Hezbollah resumes attacks as Israel seems to shift to targeted killings

Hezbollah attacked overnight through Monday two Israeli forces near the Zar'it post and the Abu Djaj heights and another group of soldiers at the Raheb post as Israel hit several areas of southern Lebanon.

Israeli warplanes struck a two-story house in Shihine and the southern towns of Tayr Harfa, Merwahin and al-Taybeh.

Israeli artillery meanwhile shelled Mays al Jabal and the outskirts of Maroun al-Ras, Aitaroun, Houla, Deir Mimas, Yarine, al-Bustan, Kfarkila and the Marjayoun plain.

There have been almost daily exchanges of fire between Israeli forces and Hezbollah in Lebanon, since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war on Oct. 7.

An Israeli strike Sunday on the southern village of Kafra killed a Lebanese Hezbollah fighter and a woman and wounded several other people.

The strike appeared to be part of a shift in Israeli strategy toward targeted killings in Lebanon after more than three months of near-daily clashes with Hezbollah militants on the border against the backdrop of the war in Gaza.

While the clashes had previously been limited mainly to a narrow strip within a few kilometers from the border, Israel in recent weeks appears to have moved to a strategy of targeted killings of figures from Hezbollah and allied groups, sometimes hitting in areas relatively far from the border, as was the case in Sunday’s strike.

On Saturday, another strike near the Lebanese port city of Tyre killed two people in a car — one of them a Hezbollah commander — and two people in a nearby orchard. The commander, Ali Hodroj, was buried Sunday in south Lebanon. The other occupant of the car, tech sector businessman Mohammad Baqir Diab, was identified as a civilian and was buried in Beirut on Sunday.

On Jan. 2, a presumed Israeli airstrike killed a top Hamas official, Saleh Arouri, in a suburb of Beirut, the first such strike in Lebanon’s capital since Israel and Hezbollah fought a brutal one-month war in 2006.

Speaking at Hodroj’s funeral Sunday, Hezbollah Member of Parliament Hussein Jeshi said Israel had “resorted to the method of assassinating some members of the resistance" to compensate for being unable to reach a military victory against Hamas after more than 100 days of war in Gaza.

The Lebanese militant group said in a statement later Sunday that it had launched an attack against the town of Avivim in northern Israel in retaliation for the strike in Kafra and for other “attacks that targeted Lebanese villages and civilians.”

Israel did not comment on the strike specifically but announced it had struck Hezbollah targets in several locations in Lebanon on Sunday. It later said that an anti-tank missile had hit a house in Avivim and no injuries were reported.

With dangers of a regional conflict flaring on multiple fronts, officials from the United States and Europe have engaged in a flurry of shuttle diplomacy in recent weeks between Israel and Lebanon, attempting to head off an escalation of the conflict into a full-on war on the Lebanese front.