BINT JBEIL, Lebanon (AP) — An Israeli strike targeting a motorcycle in southern Lebanon struck near the entrance to a hospital Monday, killing the motorcycle driver and a hospital security guard and injuring several civilians nearby, local health officials said.
It is not clear who the driver was or why he was targeted in the attack in the town of Bint Jbeil.
The Israeli military did not issue a statement on the strike but said it had targeted other areas of southern Lebanon in response to “terrorist launches.”
The Lebanese militant group Hezbollah has exchanged strikes with Israeli forces in the border area almost daily since October 8, a day after the attack. Israel-Hamas War in Gaza began.
Mohammed Suleiman, director of Salah Ghandour Hospital in Bint Jbeil, said they initially received one person killed and nine wounded in the strike, most of whom were “civilians who were in front of the hospital, where the family members and persons accompanying patients. usually congregate.
Hospital officials later said a security guard injured in the attack had died.
The strike also caused minor damage to the hospital, said an Associated Press photographer at the scene.
Hezbollah later said it launched a barrage of dozens of missiles on Meron, Safsufa and Kiryat Shmona in northern Israel in response.
Israeli strikes have killed more than 400 people in Lebanon since the start of the Gaza war, most of them militants from Hezbollah and allied groups, but also more than 70 civilians and non-combatants. On the Israeli side, strikes from Lebanon killed 15 soldiers and 10 civilians.
The clashes have caused the displacement of tens of thousands of people on each side of the border. Israeli officials have said they could launch an offensive in Lebanon if a diplomatic solution is not found allowing the displaced to return.
The Israeli military said Monday that its reservists had in recent weeks conducted “a division- and brigade-level exercise simulating ground operations in Lebanon.”
Hezbollah lawmaker Hassan Fadlallah, who visited the site of the attack in Bint Jbeil, said Israel “will not be able to send the settlers (residents) back to the north in this way.”
“The only way to end everything that is happening today in the region and on the border with Lebanon is to end the aggression against Gaza,” he said.
Western countries, particularly the United States and France, have presented a series of proposals aimed at ending hostilities on the border between Lebanon and Israel. Hezbollah refused to reach a deal until a ceasefire was implemented in Gaza.
Initially, the proposals stipulated that Hezbollah would move its forces several kilometers from the border, but a French diplomatic official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing negotiations said the latest proposal abandoned that idea because the Hezbollah would only accept it if Israel also stopped its overflights of Lebanese airspace.
Instead, the new proposal would rely on an enhanced presence of the official Lebanese army and UNIFIL peacekeeping forces in southern Lebanon to enforce a cessation of hostilities, with the long-term goal negotiations for the demarcation of the land border between Lebanon and Israel.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian was due to arrive in Beirut on Tuesday for a diplomatic visit.
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Associated Press writer Abby Sewell in Beirut contributed to this report.
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Follow AP’s war coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war
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