Foreign ministry urges int'l condemnation of Israeli 'provocations' after Ghazieh strike
Lebanon's foreign ministry has urged the international community to condemn the "ongoing" Israeli attacks and to pressure Israel to stop dragging Lebanon into an all-out war, after 14 people were wounded Monday in two Israeli air strikes on Ghaziyeh.
In a statement Monday following the strikes, the foreign ministry, called on the international community to pressure Israel "to stop its provocative attempts... to lure Lebanon into a war that (Beirut) is seeking to prevent".
Hezbollah and Israel have been exchanging near-daily fire across the border since the Israel-Hamas war broke out on October 7.
While most of the exchanges have been limited to areas near the frontier, Monday's strikes occurred in Ghaziyeh, about 30 kilometres from the nearest Israeli boundary and less than five kilometres from the city of Sidon.
An AFP photographer reported the sound of at least two successive strikes in Ghaziyeh, one targeting a hangar close to the main coastal highway, with dark smoke billowing across the area.
Lebanon's state-run National News Agency (NNA) said the strikes targeted a warehouse where tyres and electricity generators were manufactured, and the vicinity of a factory, leaving "14 wounded, most of them Syrian and Palestinian workers".
It said two emergency responders were injured while putting out the warehouse blaze.
One of the strikes targeted a factory "in an industrial area of Ghaziyeh, wounding at least eight workers", seven of them Syrians, a Lebanese security source, requesting anonymity as they were not authorized to speak to the media, said earlier.
The Israeli army said in a statement that "fighter jets struck two Hezbollah weapons storage facilities adjacent to the city of Sidon".
"The strike was carried out in response to the launch of a UAV (drone) toward the Lower Galilee in northern Israel," the statement said, adding that the drone was likely launched by Hezbollah earlier in the day.
Hezbollah, which says it is acting in support of Gaza, on Monday claimed several attacks on Israeli positions, without mentioning a drone.
The group did not immediately release any official statement on the Ghaziyeh strikes.
Since October, cross-border exchanges have killed at least 269 people on the Lebanese side, most of them Hezbollah fighters but also including 40 civilians, according to an AFP tally.
On the Israeli side, 10 soldiers and six civilians have been killed, according to the Israeli army.
Source: Naharnet, Agence France Presse
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