JANNATA: Plumes of smoke billowed on Friday over a south Lebanon village after a deadly Israeli strike as shopkeepers swept shattered glass and vowed to stay put despite soaring cross-border violence.

Jannata had been largely spared more than eight months of clashes between Hezbollah fighters and Israeli forces as war rages in Gaza, but the Lebanese village was shaken by an overnight strike that officials say killed two civilians.

“We were sitting on the balcony at night, and we felt a rocket fly over our heads. Then the world started to shake,” resident Khadija Husseini told AFP.

On Friday morning, she found that her clothing store had been damaged in the strike which targeted a building about 200 metres (650 feet) away. “There was shattered glass everywhere” from the shop window, she said.

Hezbollah launches rocket barrage against targets in Israel

Lebanon’s official National News Agency said a building was hit in Jannata, 20km from the Israeli border. The village’s deputy mayor, Hassan Shur, told AFP that two civilians, both women, were killed in a nearby building.

Rescuers said at least nine people were wounded in the strike on Jannata, including an infant and two children.

An AFP photographer said a three-storey building had been completely destroyed.

“We will not be displaced”

The strike, which the Israeli military has not commented on, comes on the heels of a major Hezbollah attack.

Hezbollah launched barrages of rockets and drones on Wednesday and Thursday targeting Israeli military sites across the border, after an Israeli strike earlier this week killed a senior commander.

Battle in Gaza

Israeli forces struck Gaza and battled Hamas fighters on Friday as truce efforts failed to make progress. Witnesses reported strikes on the southern city of Rafah and central areas of the Gaza Strip.

At Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the central city of Deir al-Balah, men gathered over the body of an 11-year-old boy who died during a bombardment of nearby Bureij refugee camp.

In a black singlet, the child lay on a floor smeared with fresh blood, a white bandage covering the top half of his face, AFP images showed.

The Israeli military said troops continued operations in central Gaza, where warplanes struck a fighters’ cell in the Zeitun area.

Witnesses in Rafah, on Gaza’s southern border with Egypt, reported helicopter fire on the city’s west and centre, while Hamas’s armed wing said its fighters fired mortar rounds at Israeli troops near the Tal al-Sultan neighbourhood.

Published in Dawn, June 15th, 2024