An Israeli drone strike killed two people and wounded three more in southern Lebanon on Monday, the Lebanese civil defence said, as Lebanon braced for Israeli retaliation following a rocket strike that killed 12 teenagers and children at the weekend.
Late on Sunday, Israel’s security cabinet authorised prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s government to decide on the “manner and timing” of a response to the rocket strike in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
Israel and the United States blamed Lebanon’s Hizbullah for Saturday’s strike. The Iran-backed group has denied any role.
The incident in which a missile hit a sports field in the Golan Heights, has risked tipping the fragile standoff into a more serious escalation, drawing international calls on both sides to show restraint.
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There was no immediate indication of what action Israel may take but the country’s largest newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth quoted unnamed officials as saying the response would be “limited but significant”.
The report said options for retaliation ranged from a limited attack on infrastructure including bridges, power plants and ports, to hitting Hizbullah weapons depots or targeting high-level Hizbullah commanders.
Monday's Israeli drone strike in southern Lebanon wounded three people including an infant, an official in the Lebanese civil defence told Reuters. The rescue service did not say whether the dead were fighters or civilians.
The Israeli military said its air defences downed a drone that crossed from Lebanon into the area of Western Galilee on Monday.
Flights at Beirut's international airport have been cancelled or delayed as airlines responded to the possibility of an Israeli response.
Both Israel and Hizbullah have appeared at pains to avoid a full-scale war since they began trading blows in October in a conflict ignited by the Gaza war.
US secretary of state Antony Blinken said on Sunday he does not want to see an escalation of conflict on Israel’s northern border and reiterated US support for Israel.
“I emphasise [Israel’s] right to defend its citizens and our determination to make sure that they’re able to do that,” Mr Blinken said during a news conference in Tokyo. “But we also don’t want to see the conflict escalate. We don’t want to see it spread.”
Hizbullah has denied firing the rocket that killed the youngsters but it said at the time it had fired a missile against a military target on the Golan Heights, a border area Israel seized from Syria after the 1967 Middle East war and has since annexed in a move not generally recognised internationally.
Elsewhere, thousands of Palestinians fled a community in the central Gaza Strip on Monday in the face of new Israeli evacuation orders, worsening the humanitarian plight in an area already inundated with displaced people fleeing an assault in the south.
Israeli forces, which have now captured nearly the entire Gaza Strip in nearly 10 months of war, have spent the last several weeks launching major operations in areas where they had previously claimed to have uprooted Hamas fighters.
Hundreds of thousands of people have converged on Deir al-Balah, a small city in the centre of the enclave that is the only major area yet to be stormed, many forced there by fighting in the ruins of Khan Younis further south since last week.
In its latest assault, Israel ordered residents on Sunday to flee Al-Bureij, just northeast of Deir.
The Israeli military said fighter jets hit 35 targets across the Gaza Strip over the past day as troops battled fighters in Khan Younis and Rafah, close to the border with Egypt. The armed wings of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad said fierce gun battles have been ongoing in those two areas as well as in the suburb of Tel Al-Hawa in Gaza City further north.
Palestinian medical officials said at least eight Palestinians were killed in an Israeli air strike earlier in Khan Younis.
On Sunday, the military issued new evacuation orders to some districts in Bureij, forcing thousands to leave before the army blew up several houses.
Some families used donkey carts and rickshaws to carry whatever belongings remained. Many walked for several kilometres on foot to reach Deir or al-Zawayda town to the west. – Reuters