BEIRUT: A senior Hamas officer survived on Saturday an Israeli assassination attempt in Lebanon, Palestinian and Lebanese security sources said, with officials reporting two killed in the attack south of Beirut.

Israeli forces and the Lebanese movement Hezbollah, a Hamas ally, have traded near-daily fire since Oct 7. But the Israel-Lebanon violence has been largely contained to the border area, and Saturday’s strike was the second-farthest deadly attack from the frontier in four months of hostilities.

Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency (NNA) said an Israeli drone struck a car in the coastal town of Jadra, about 40 kilometres from the border.

The Palestinian source said the strike “was a failed attempt to assassinate a senior official in the (Hamas) movement”.

A Lebanese security official identified the target as Hamas recruitment officer Bassel Saleh. Shortly after the initial strike on Saleh’s car, a second Israeli drone hit the same location, killing two people, the official said. Hezbollah said one of its members had died.

Saleh “survived but suffered burns on his back and was admitted to hospital”, the Lebanese official said.

The official added Saleh is “in charge of a recruitment unit in the West Bank”, occupied by Israel since 1967.

A Hamas official in Lebanon said that no member of the group had been killed in the Jadra attack.

An official with the Lebanese Risala Scout association, which operates rescue teams and is affiliated with the Hezbollah-allied Amal movement, said that two civilians had been killed.

But Hezbollah later announced one of its members had been killed by Israeli fire. A source close to the group said the man, Khalil Fares, was one of the two people killed in his town of Jadra.

There was no immediate comment from Israel.

A photographer at the scene saw a damaged car and a charred motorcycle nearby, with bloodstains all over the site of the strike near the beach.

On Saturday, the NNA reported several Israeli strikes on south Lebanon villages, with Hezbollah also claiming attacks on Israeli positions across the border. Hezbollah in a statement also said it “took control of an Israeli enemy Skylark drone”.

On Thursday, an Israeli drone strike seriously wounded a Hezbollah commander in southern Lebanon, with the group later firing a salvo of rockets into northern Israel.

In January, a strike widely attributed to Israel killed Hamas’s deputy leader Saleh al-Aruri in Hezbollah’s south Beirut stronghold — the most high-profile Hamas figure to be killed during the war.

Published in Dawn, February 11th, 2024