Hezbollah rockets Israeli bases: Tel Aviv carries out raids
RASHAYA (Lebanon), June 29: Hezbollah militia bombarded an Israeli army post in the disputed Shebaa Farms border area with Lebanon on Wednesday, wounding at least two people and prompting retaliatory artillery fire and air raids.
Al Manar, the television of the Hezbollah, later cited Israeli sources as saying one Israeli was killed and five others were wounded in the shooting started by its forces.
Earlier, an Israeli military spokesman said there were seven Israeli ‘casualties’.
The confrontation began when around 20 Katyusha rockets and mortar rounds were fired at the Ramta and Sammaqiyeh positions in the Shebaa Farms, security sources in Lebanon said.
Hezbollah artillery also fired on Israeli army positions at Aamfit, on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, they said.
An Israeli military source in Jerusalem said Hezbollah carried out a coordinated mortar and small-arms attack on an army post at Har Dov, in the Shebaa Farms.
“There are Israeli injuries,” one source said, with another saying at least two people were wounded.
Army radio said one member of a Hezbollah commando that infiltrated Israeli-held territory had been killed.
Lebanese police said Israeli artillery responded, firing some 50 rounds on hills around the towns of Kfarshuba and Shebaa, adding that there were no immediate reports of casualties.
They later said Israeli warplanes bombarded an area around Kfarshuba, firing two missiles, before returning and firing two more around Shebaa.
In between the two air raids, the Hezbollah fighters fired four surface-to-surface missiles on an Israeli position in Fashkoul, police said.
Fifteen houses, the telephone exchange and a service station were damaged in the Israeli bombardment of Shebaa, the police added, without saying whether there had been any casualties.
Ten minutes later, they said, the warplanes reappeared, firing two missiles at the neighbouring village of Hebbariyeh and two more on the Wadi Halta valley.
In a fifth strike, bombers fired two missiles on the road linking Shebaa with villages in the Hasbaya region, further east.
For more than 90 minutes after the first Hezbollah attack, Israeli field artillery pounded the outskirts of villages in the area.
The Hezbollah attack came as Israeli forces have been reinforcing fortifications along the frontier between the Shebaa Farms and Lebanon, including installation of new barbed-wire barriers and surveillance cameras.
Israeli sources initially reported Hezbollah firing on the main border town of Kiryat Shmona but later acknowledged that the blast was caused by a bomb accidentally dropped by an Israeli helicopter.
The last attack was on May 21, when Hezbollah militants fired on troops in the sector in response to Israeli fire that damaged five houses in Shebaa.
The small mountainous Shebaa Farms area lies at the convergence of the Israeli, Lebanese and Syrian borders. It was captured from Syria in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and is now claimed by Lebanon with Damascus’s approval. —AFP
