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Hezbollah says Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon late on Friday have killed eight of their members, including several local officials. The strikes targeted an area near the village of Rayak in the northeast of the country.
The attack, which targeted a residential building, destroyed the top floor of a three-storey complex.
A Hezbollah official, speaking to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity, said that three of the dead were local commanders and identified them as Ali al-Moussawi, Mohammed al-Moussawi and Hussein Yaghi.
Israel also confirmed on Saturday that its attacks have “eliminated” Hezbollah members, in an attack which it said targeted “command centres” in the Baalbek area.
In a post on X, the Israeli Defence Forces said the targeted members were “operating to accelerate readiness and force build-up processes, while planning fire attacks toward Israel and advancing terror attack”.
“Their actions constituting a violation of the understandings between Israel and Lebanon,” continued the IDF.
Yaghi was the son of prominent Hezbollah official and one of its founders, Mohammed Yaghi, who died in 2023. Mohammed Yaghi was also a close aide to the late Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in September 2024.
Lebanon’s Health Ministry said Saturday that Israeli strikes on eastern Lebanon killed 10 people, including three children, and wounded two dozen others.
A doctor at the nearby Rayak Hospital corroborated the official account, saying they had received the bodies of 10 people and were treating 21 people who had sustained injuries.
The doctor said that two of those killed in the strikes – which he says took place shortly after sunset on Friday – were non-Lebanese; a Syrian man and an Ethiopian woman.
He also added that eight of those wounded were also foreign nationals, including five Syrians and three Ethiopians.
The death toll from Friday’s strikes was unusually high and comes at a moment of intensified tensions in the region as the United States has threatened to strike Iran — a backer of both Hezbollah and Hamas — if negotiations over Tehran’s nuclear program fail to produce a deal.
Israeli strikes on Lebanon have occurred almost daily despite a ceasefire being in effect since November 2024.
The deal, brokered by former US President Joe Biden, aimed to establish a truce after more than a year of hostilities and cross-border exchanges between Hezbollah and Israel.
Hezbollah started the attacks after Israel launched its offensive on Gaza following a Hamas-led operation in southern Israel on 7 October, 2023. Israel responded with regular strikes and shelling.
Tensions escalated from a low-scale conflict to a full-scale war in September 2024. The existing truce reduced the attacks, but hasn’t fully stopped them.
Israel has accused Hezbollah of trying to rebuild and says its attacks are aimed at preventing the group’s rearmament, and exclusively target their members and infrastructure. The Lebanese government says dozens of civilians have been killed in strikes since the ceasefire.
Additional sources • AP
