Lebanese soldiers near the site of an Israeli drone strike in Soueiri, West Bekaa, March 24, 2024. (Credit: Hassan Jarrah/AFP)
A Palestinian Hamas official escaped an Israeli drone strike targeting him in eastern Lebanon on Sunday, a Lebanese security source told AFP on Monday.
A Syrian civilian, driving a utility vehicle, was killed in the strike in the Soueiri region of the Bekaa. Since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas in October, Hezbollah has exchanged near-daily fire with Israel on the Lebanese-Israeli border, in support of its Palestinian ally in the Gaza Strip.
Israel retaliates with bombings and strikes that increasingly penetrate Lebanese territory, regularly targeting Hezbollah and Hamas officials. The strike on Soueiri was the first since the outbreak of violence to target the western Bekaa, five kilometers from Lebanon's border with Syria.
The targeted vehicle, blue in color, was carrying food products. Its driver, a Syrian who lives in Soueiri and owns a supermarket in the village, succumbed to his injuries after the strike. According to L'Orient-Le Jour's correspondent in the region, the targeted car did not belong to this man. According to the security source quoted by AFP, the drone strike was in fact aimed at a Hamas official in Lebanon, whom they did not name, who was passing along the same road and escaped the raid.
On March 13, a member of the armed wing of Hamas in Lebanon was killed in an Israeli strike that targeted his car near the southern coastal city of Sour.
On Jan. 2, a senior Hamas official, Saleh al-Arouri, was killed in a drone attack blamed on Israel on the southern suburbs of Beirut, a Hezbollah stronghold. And on Feb. 10, Hamas official Bassel Saleh escaped death when an Israeli drone targeted his car some 40 km north of the Israeli-Lebanese border. And on March 13, a missile fired by a drone killed Hadi Mustafa, a Hamas official in the Rashidiyeh camp on the southern outskirts of Sour, in a first strike near this major southern city.
On Saturday night, five Israeli strikes also targeted a deserted Hezbollah building in the Baalbeck area, further north, according to another security source. Four people, including a Hezbollah member, were wounded, according to this source.
This article originally appeared in French in L'Orient-Le Jour.