JERUSALEM – Three fighters who crossed into Israel from Lebanon and two Israelis were killed in clashes and a strike along the frontier between the two countries on Sunday, the army and medics said.
Since the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip erupted on October 7, the Israel-Lebanon border has seen near-daily exchanges of fire between Iran-backed Hizbollah group and Israeli forces.
Hizbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, in a televised speech on Sunday, said the Israelis had “failed” to achieve any of its goals in Gaza.
The Israeli military said troops patrolling a contested border area “identified a terrorist cell who crossed from Lebanon into Israeli territory and fired at the forces” overnight.
Three fighters who clashed with troops were shot dead, the army said, revising an earlier statement that said four had been killed.
The army said five soldiers were wounded in the firefight.
A group calling itself Kataeb Al-Ezz Al-Islamiya later said the fighters were from its ranks, Lebanese media reported.
The group said the assault was in response to the killing of Hamas deputy chief Saleh al-Aruri in a suburb of Beirut on January 2, in an attack which was widely attributed to an Israeli drone strike.
Later on Sunday, the Israeli military said warplanes struck Hizbollah positions following a missile strike on a house in the border community of Kfar Yuval that wounded multiple Israelis.
The Magen David Adom (MDA) emergency service said an Israeli man was pronounced dead after the missile strike in Kfar Yuval and a 70-year-old woman was in a serious condition.
The local municipality said later that the woman had died and the man who had died was her son, an Israeli soldier.
Hizbollah said it carried out several attacks on Sunday including in Kfar Yuval, where it claimed to target Israeli soldiers, adding there were “injuries and deaths”.
Violence on the border since October 7 has killed 190 people in Lebanon, including more than 140 Hezbollah fighters and over 20 civilians including three journalists, according to an AFP tally.
In Israel’s north, at least 15 people, including 10 soldiers, have been killed, according to Israeli authorities.
Israel and Hizbollah fought a month-long war in 2006.
