At least 11 civilians, including children, killed in fresh Israeli strikes on Lebanon

Beirut, Feb 15: At least 11 people, including children, have been killed in Israeli strikes on villages in southern Lebanon, according to a report.

A hospital director and three Lebanese security sources told Reuters that 11 people, including six children, were killed during strikes the Israeli military carried out against villages across southern Lebanon on Wednesday.

The Tel Aviv regime said in a statement that it had responded to an earlier rocket attack conducted by the Lebanese Hezbollah resistance movement that killed an Israeli trooper. The resistance group, however, did not announce any operations on Wednesday.

Initial reports had said four civilians were killed in the strikes.

Hezbollah and Israel have been trading near daily cross-border fire since the occupying regime waged a deadly war on Gaza on October 7.

Hezbollah, whose constant rocket fire has prompted tens of thousands of Israeli settlers to flee from the northern areas of the occupied territories, says its operations are meant to support Gaza’s resistance.

Two security sources said that a woman and her two children had been killed in an Israeli strike on the village of al-Sawana on Wednesday.

Another strike on a building in Nabatieh claimed the lives of four more children, three women and a man, according to the director of the town’s hospital, Hassan Wazni, and three other security sources. Wazni further said that seven people were also wounded in the strikes.

Sources also said that four Hezbollah fighters were also killed in separate strikes.

Hezbollah has warned it would expand the anti-Israel front in the south if the occupying regime escalated its acts of aggression against the Lebanese territory and the Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip.

The resistance group has vowed to keep up its retaliatory operations as long as the usurping entity continues its aggression against Gaza, which has so far killed more than 28,500 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured over 68,200 others.

On Tuesday, Hezbollah’s secretary-general Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah reiterated in a televised address that his group would only stop its exchanges of fire if a full and permanent ceasefire was reached for Gaza.