The Israeli military said on Tuesday that Hezbollah breached the ceasefire in Lebanon by firing several rockets at Israeli troops in the south and launching a drone towards Israel.
It is the first time Hezbollah has fired at Israel – and the area it occupies in southern Lebanon – since a tenuous 10-day ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel came into effect on Friday. The truce followed six weeks of intense Israeli bombardment and a ground invasion in southern Lebanon that the UN says may have amounted to war crimes.
Despite the truce, Israel has continued to demolish homes in the south in what it says is an effort to establish a “forward defence line”, while firing artillery at people attempting to return to their homes and carrying out sporadic strikes in southern Lebanon.
Under the terms of the truce, Israel has remained in areas of southern Lebanon that it invaded during the war. On Sunday, its military published a map of what it called a “forward defence line”, an area it occupies that stretches roughly 10km into southern Lebanon and takes in dozens of villages.
The Israeli military said rockets were fired towards troops stationed in the Rab Al Thalathine area, within the “forward defence line”. Within minutes, it said, Israeli forces struck the launcher used in the attack. Separately, the military said sirens that sounded in the border communities of Kfar Yuval and Ma'ayan Baruch were triggered by the interception of a drone launched from Lebanon, revising an earlier assessment that they were false alarms.
The drone was shot down before crossing into Israeli territory, the military said, calling the incidents “blatant violations of the ceasefire agreement.” According to a report by The Legal Agenda, Israel committed 220 ceasefire breaches in Lebanon between April 17 and April 19, killing three people and wounding seven, including four paramedics.
The report said, quoting data from the Lebanese National Centre for Scientific Research and the National Centre for Natural Hazards and Early Warning, that the breaches included air strikes, detonations and the destruction of infrastructure, artillery shelling, machine-gun fire and overflights by military and reconnaissance aircraft, including over Beirut.
Lebanon was drawn into the regional conflict after the Iran-backed Hezbollah began launching missiles at Israel from Lebanese territory on March 2 in support of Iran and after US-backed Israeli strikes killed Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. More than 2,300 people have been killed by Israeli attacks since war broke out again, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry.
