Israel kills 3 Hezbollah members on Syria border

BEIRUT, Lebanon

Israeli strikes targeting a convoy of tankers entering Lebanon from Syria late Monday killed three members of Hezbollah, a Lebanese military source and a war monitor said.

A Hamas ally, the Iran-backed militant group has traded near-daily fire with Israeli forces since the Palestinian group’s October 7 attack on Israel triggered war in Gaza.

“Three Hezbollah members were killed by nine Israeli missile strikes that targeted a convoy of tankers and a building” in a northeastern village on the border with Syria, the military source told our reporter, adding that three people were also wounded.

The Israeli military said its “fighter jets struck a military complex of the Hezbollah 4400 unit, the logistical reinforcement unit of the Hezbollah terrorist organization.”

“The unit is used to smuggle weapons to and from Lebanon,” it said in a statement, adding that it had hit two targets in the Baalbek region of eastern Lebanon.

Britain-based war monitor the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said a total of five people were killed in the Israeli strike.

“Three Syrians working with Hezbollah and two Lebanese were killed in an Israeli strike targeting a convoy of tankers entering Lebanon on the border with Syria,” the monitor’s director Rami Abdel Rahman told reporters.

The Israeli army said it also carried out strikes in southern Lebanon overnight after one of its drones was shot down on Monday.

A few hours before the strikes, Hezbollah said it had downed an Israeli Hermes drone over Lebanon, the fifth of the type since February.

Hezbollah, which has stepped up its own use of drones, said it carried out several attacks against Israeli targets on Monday, including a drone attack on a military position in the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights.

More than eight months of violence have killed at least 462 people in Lebanon, mostly fighters but also including around 90 civilians, according to an AFP count.

On the Israeli side of the border, at least 15 soldiers and 11 civilians have been killed, according to the army.