Israeli aircraft struck Hezbollah weapons smuggling sites along Syria’s border with Lebanon, the Israeli military said on Saturday, testing a fragile, days-old ceasefire that halted months of fighting.
Israel said it hit sites used to smuggle weapons from Syria to Lebanon after the ceasefire took effect, which the military said was a violation of its terms.
There was no immediate comment from Syrian authorities or activists monitoring the conflict in that country. Hezbollah also did not immediately comment. Israeli aircraft have struck Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, citing ceasefire violations, several times since the truce began on Wednesday.
The ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah does not address the war in Gaza, where fighting rages on. On Saturday, an Israeli strike on a car killed five people, according to Muneer Alboursh, a senior Palestinian health official, who said the toll included three employees of the food charity World Central Kitchen (WCK).
The charity could not immediately be reached for comment and made no mention of the incident on its social media.
The Israeli military said it struck a vehicle carrying a militant involved in Hamas’s attack on 7 October 2023. It said it was looking into the reported ties to WCK, but said the car was unmarked and had not coordinated an aid delivery with the military as charities have done during the war.
At Nasser hospital in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, a woman allegedly held up an employee badge bearing the WCK logo, the word “contractor” and the name of one of the men said to have been killed in the strike. A heap of belongings – burnt phones, a watch and stickers with the WCK logo – lay on the hospital floor.
An Israeli strike in April on a WCK convoy killed seven of its workers, most of them foreigners. The Israeli military said it was a mistake.
The truce between Israel and the Iran-backed Hezbollah, brokered by the US and France, calls for an initial two-month ceasefire in which the militants are to withdraw north of Lebanon’s Litani River and Israeli forces are to return to their side of the border.
The repeated bursts of violence – with no reports of serious casualties – reflected the uneasy nature of the ceasefire that has otherwise appeared to hold. While Israel has accused Hezbollah of violating the ceasefire, Lebanon has also accused Israel of the same in the days since it took effect.
Many of the 1.2 million people in Lebanon displaced by the conflict have been returning south to their homes, despite warnings by the Israeli and Lebanese militaries to stay away from certain areas.
Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency reported that an Israeli drone attacked a car in the southern village of Majdal Zoun. Lebanon’s health ministry said three people were wounded, including a seven-year-old child. Majdal Zoun, near the Mediterranean Sea, is close to where Israeli troops still have a presence.
The military said earlier on Saturday that its forces, who will remain in southern Lebanon until they withdraw gradually over the 60-day period, had been operating to distance “suspects” in the region, without elaborating, and said troops had located and seized weapons found hidden in a mosque.
