Around 10 people were killed, including two children, and five were wounded by an Israeli air strike on a residential building in the city of Nabatieh in south Lebanon, state news agency NNA said on Saturday.
The victims were all Syrian citizens, NNA said, adding that a final toll of the strike would be announced after DNA tests were conducted to determine the identity of the victims.
The Israeli military said the air strike targeted a weapons depot used by Hizbullah militants.
The Israeli strike came after ceasefire talks between Palestinian Islamist group Hamas and Israel in Doha paused on Friday with negotiators due to meet again next week.
Hizbullah later said in a statement that it had struck the Ayelet Hashahar Kibbutz in northern Israel in retaliation for the Nabatieh strike.
Two soldiers were wounded in a rocket attack from Lebanon, the Israeli military said, adding that a total of 55 rockets had been fired in latest strikes from Lebanon.
Also on Saturday, an Israeli drone targeted a motorcycle in the Qadmous area east of Tyre in south Lebanon, NNA reported, adding that one person was injured. A security source said one person was killed in the motorcycle attack.
Tensions have soared in the region in recent weeks, after a rocket strike blamed on Hizbullah killed 12 children and teens in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Israel responded with the killing of a top Hizbullah commander in the suburbs of Beirut.
Hizbullah has vowed to retaliate against Israel, as has Iran for the killing in Tehran of the political chief of the Palestinian Hamas group, Ismail Haniyeh.
Meanwhile, at least 17 Palestinians were killed and dozens wounded in an Israeli strike in the Gaza town of Zawayda on Saturday, health officials said, as Israel issued new evacuation orders, citing Hamas rocket fire nearby.
Most of the people killed were from the same family and they included eight children and four women, according to health officials in the Hamas-administered enclave.
Israel’s military said it was aware of the reports of the strike and was looking into them.
“They were asleep in their beds, kids and babies, then three missiles targeted their place,” said Abu Ahmed Hassan, a neighbour. The owner of the house was a known merchant, he said. “There are no military activities here at all,” he said.
Israel’s military spokesman in Arabic posted instructions on X on Saturday for people in parts of central Gaza, including in Maghazi district which is near Zawayda, to evacuate to a designated humanitarian zone.
He said militants were firing rockets from those locations and that the military was preparing to act against them.
Reuters could not immediately verify whether any areas of Zawayda were among those ordered to evacuate and whether people there received the military’s instructions. Residents said thousands were streaming out of Maghazi.
[ Israeli army orders fresh evacuations in Gaza as fighting continuesOpens in new window ]
On Friday, two sections of the southern city of Khan Younis within what Israel has designated as a humanitarian zone were deemed dangerous by the military, which ordered people to evacuate them saying that militants had been regularly firing rockets from there.
The United Nations Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said Friday’s orders, which also included other areas of the enclave outside the humanitarian zones, had affected around 170,000 displaced people.
“This is one of the largest evacuation orders affecting the zone to date and it shrinks the size of the so-called ‘humanitarian area’ to about 41sq km, or 11 per cent of the total area of the Gaza Strip,” an OCHA report said.
In the central part of the enclave, residents said that Israeli tanks advanced further on Saturday into the eastern area of Deir Al-Balah, an area they had not invaded before, where hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians are sheltering.
The Israeli military said that since Friday its forces had killed dozens of militants, including some who had fired rockets from central and southern Gaza.
Most of Gaza’s 2.3 million population has been displaced by the 10-month-old Israeli offensive, which has laid waste to much of the enclave.
Ceasefire talks in Doha, mediated by the United States, Qatar and Egypt, paused on Friday with negotiators to meet again next week seeking an agreement to end the fighting between Israel and Hamas and free remaining hostages.
US president Joe Biden said on Friday that no party in the Middle East should undermine efforts to reach a ceasefire and hostage release deal that he said was now in sight, while at the same time warning that negotiations were “far from over”.
Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri said in response that reports of an agreement being close were “deceptive claims”.
The war was triggered on October 7th when the militant Islamist group Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking about 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
Israel’s subsequent military campaign has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians, according to Gaza health authorities. Israel has lost 330 soldiers in Gaza and says at least a third of the Palestinian dead are fighters. – Reuters
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