Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Benny Gantz have sharply reacted to the escalations at the country’s northern border. Netanyahu has said that Hezbollah was “playing with fire”. The Lebanese Shiite group denied all involvement.
Netanyahu said that Hezbollah and the Lebanese government “bear responsibility” for the attempt by gunmen to infiltrate Israeli territory, which resulted in an exchange of gunfire but no reported casualties, reports Arab News.
“Hezbollah is playing with fire and our response will be very strong,” the Israeli premier said.
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Lebanon’s Prime Minister Hassan Diab said on Tuesday that Israel had violated his country’s sovereignty with a “dangerous military escalation” along the Israeli-Lebanese frontier on Monday and called for caution amid heightened border tensions.
The Times reported that a Hezbollah unit had infiltrated across the UN “Blue Line” that marks the de facto border into the area, a strip six miles long and two miles deep.
The pro-Hezbollah media claimed the unit fired a Kornet missile at an Israeli Merkeva tank, though this was subsequently denied by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). It said there had been no Israeli casualties in the incident and that soldiers had returned fire, sending the Hezbollah operatives back into Lebanon. It stepped back from earlier claims by Israeli media that several Hezbollah fighters had been killed, saying only that their condition was “not known”.
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Meanwhile, an Israeli military spokesman said Israeli troops had “thwarted an infiltration attempt by a Hezbollah terror squad” across a boundary with Israeli-occupied territory, and that there were no Israeli casualties.
Iran-backed Hezbollah has vowed in the past to retaliate for any fighter that Israel kills in Syria. The group fired a barrage of anti-tank missiles into Israel on Sept. 1 last year after two of its fighters were killed in an Israeli airstrike near Damascus days earlier.
Such an airstrike which is widely thought to be operated by Israel has caused the death of a Hezbollah fighter on the 20th of this month. The attack was carried out over Damascus.