Kornet anti-tank missile

Hezbollah hit Israeli military vehicles in the Galilee region

Hezbollah hit Israeli military vehicles in the Galilee region with anti-tank missiles yesterday, prompting retaliatory airstrikes and artillery fire on Lebanese villages on the Israeli border, in what is the most serious clash between the old enemies for four years.

Saad Hariri, the prime minister of Lebanon, appealed to the US and France to intervene to prevent the exchange escalating into open war.

The region has been braced for further violence after Israel struck a series of Hezbollah targets last weekend, killing two militants near Damascus who they said were about to launch a drone attack over the border, with the assistance of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Hezbollah claimed to have hit an Israeli military base and ambulance, killing its occupants in yesterday’s attack. Israel released a statement saying that a vehicle and a military installation had been hit but denied that there had been any casualties.

The anti-tank rockets were identified as Russian-made AT-14 “Kornet” guided missiles. The Israel defence forces said that they had been fired from the outskirts of Maroun al-Ras, a Lebanese village about a mile north of the Israeli border. Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia dedicated to fighting Israel, is also a fully fledged political party that holds seats in Lebanon’s government and is the dominant power in the country’s far south area.

Its missile attack yesterday targeted an Israeli army base located between the agricultural communities of Avivim and Yiron.

Israeli forces responded with artillery and fire from aircraft at targets in Maroun al-Ras and other Lebanese villages over the border. An Israeli military spokesman said that they had successfully hit the building from which the rockets had been fired. The shelling was intended, in part, to prevent further rocket attacks on Israeli manoeuvres being carried out on the border.

Hezbollah said in a statement that its attack had been carried out by a brigade named after Hassan Zbeeb and Yasser Daher, the two militants killed in the Damascus attack.

Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, said in a speech on Saturday: “Our response for last week’s events will be launched from within Lebanon against Israeli targets.” He added that it would take place “in every possible place along the border”.

Israel has ratcheted up its attacks on Hezbollah and other Iranian-linked targets across the Middle East in recent years. It believes that Iran has used the Syrian war, in which it supports President Assad, to try to develop a series of bases to use as manufacturing sites and transfer points for Hezbollah’s weaponry. Hezbollah claims to have more than 100,000 missiles ready for war.

Israel has struck inside Syria more than a hundred times and its military strategists say that in response Iran and Hezbollah have tried to develop facilities in Lebanon. Israel is also believed to have successfully targeted Iranian militia bases in Iraq on at least three occasions this summer.

Despite the latest flare up both sides say that they are not looking for an escalation to an all-out conflict. The last full war between the two played out in 2006, when more than 1,000 Lebanese Hezbollah fighters and civilians were killed along with 100 Israeli soldiers.

Since then Hezbollah has lost more than 1,000 fighters in clashes with Syrian rebels in the defence of the Assad regime.

(The Times)