Cross-border violence intensified Saturday, following the killing of 10 people overnight Friday to Saturday in an Israeli strike on a building inhabited by Syrian families, a few kilometers west of Nabatieh in southern Lebanon, the Lebanese Health Ministry reported. The strike was the deadliest single attack in Lebanon since the start of the conflict between Hezbollah and the Israeli army on Oct. 8.

The airstrike, which took place after 1 a.m., targeted a building in an industrial zone between Kfour and Toul, totally destroying it. The blast also caused damage to neighboring houses, according to our correspondent Muntasser Abdallah.

"The scene, among the rubble and body parts, is frightening," one of the Lebanese Civil Defense volunteers present at the scene during the night told our correspondent. He also reported "cries of distress coming from the rubble."

By 8.30 a.m., the search through the rubble was almost complete, according to the rescue workers on site.

According to a relative of a Syrian family killed in the blast (a woman, her husband and two children), the mother had fled Homs in 2012 because of the Syrian civil war and married in Lebanon. Her children were aged four and one and a half, he told our journalist Lyana Alameddine.

The Israeli army claimed it struck "a Hezbollah weapons warehouse" in Nabatieh during the night, as well as "military structures" belonging to Hezbollah in the Hanine and Maroun al-Ras areas in southern Lebanon near the Israeli border.

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Hezbollah's response

Reacting to the strike on Kfour, Hezbollah targeted a new site in Israel. In a press release, it claimed it "fired salvoes of Katyusha rockets at Ayelet Hashahar in response to the aggression of the Israeli enemy, in particular that which cost the lives of Syrian civilians’ in Nabatieh."

The party also fired salvoes of Katyusha rockets at a town in northern Israel on Saturday and claimed responsibility for a series of attacks on Israeli sites. Rocket warning sirens sounded in Ayelet Hashahar, and "around 55 projectiles were identified as coming from Lebanon, some of which landed in vacant lots," the Israeli army said in a statement. No casualties were reported. But fires have broken out in the area, which the emergency services are working to extinguish, it added.

A Hezbollah fighter was also killed on Saturday in an Israeli drone strike on a motorbike in Kadmous, north of Sour, our correspondent in south Lebanon reported. In a statement, Hezbollah announced the death of Hussein Ibrahim Kassab, born in 1989 and originally from Tayr Debba in southern Lebanon. The Israeli army also said it killed this man in the strike, claiming that he was a commander in the al-Radwan force, Hezbollah's elite unit.

Earlier in the day, two Israeli soldiers were wounded, one of them seriously, when a rocket fired from Lebanon fell on the Misgav Am region on Israel's northern border, according to the Israeli army.

The cross-border exchanges of fire between Hezbollah and Israel, which have been almost daily since Oct. 8 October, intensified after the death on 30 July of Hezbollah's military chief, Fouad Shokur, in an Israeli strike in Beirut, the day before the assassination in Tehran of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, which has been blamed on Israel by Iran and its allies. Tehran and Hezbollah have threatened Israel with reprisals, raising fears of a regional military escalation that international diplomacy is trying to prevent by redoubling its efforts to bring about a cease-fire in Gaza. 

This article was originally published in French on L'Orient-Le Jour.