BEIRUT: Lebanon’s Hezbollah said it attacked northern Israel on Tuesday with “explosive-laden drones,” a day after an assault claimed by the Iran-backed movement killed two soldiers there.
Israel and Hezbollah have exchanged regular cross-border fire since Palestinian militant group Hamas’s unprecedented October 7 attack on southern Israel sparked war in the Gaza Strip.
In recent weeks Hezbollah has stepped up its attacks, which it says are in support of Gazans and its ally Hamas, and Israel’s military has struck deeper into Lebanese territory.
Hezbollah fighters on Tuesday launched “explosive-laden drones targeting enemy soldiers and officers,” the group said in a statement.
At the same time, other drones “targeted one of the Iron Dome (air defense system) platforms,” the militants said, adding in separate statements that they carried out other attacks on northern Israel, including with guided missiles.
Israel’s army said on Tuesday that two soldiers had been killed a day earlier in the north.
On Monday, Hezbollah claimed a drone attack on troops near northern Israel’s Metula, with the Israeli military saying “a UAV (drone) was identified crossing from Lebanon” into the area.
In Lebanon, at least 390 people have been killed in nearly seven months of cross-border violence, mostly militants but also more than 70 civilians, according to an AFP tally.
Israel says 13 soldiers and nine civilians have been killed on its side of the border.
Tens of thousands of people have been displaced on both sides.

Paris: As well as killing more than 34,000 people and causing catastrophic levels of hunger and injury, the seven-month war between Israel and Hamas has also caused massive material destruction in Gaza.
“The rate of damage being registered is unlike anything we have studied before. It is much faster and more extensive than anything we have mapped,” said Corey Scher, a PhD candidate at the City University of New York, who has been researching satellite imagery of Gaza.
As Israel launches an offensive on Rafah, the last population center in Gaza yet to be entered by its ground troops, AFP looks at the territory’s shattered landscape seven months into the war sparked by Hamas’s unprecedented October 7 attack.
Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on the planet, where before the war 2.3 million people had been living on a 365-square-kilometer strip of land.
According to satellite analyzes by Scher and Jamon Van Den Hoek, an associate professor of geography at Oregon State University, 56.9 percent of Gaza buildings were damaged or destroyed as of April 21, totaling 160,000.
“The fastest rates of destruction were in the first two to three months of the bombardment,” Scher told AFP.
In Gaza City, home to some 600,000 people before the war, the situation is dire: almost three-quarters (74.3 percent) of its buildings have been damaged or destroyed.
During the war, Gaza’s hospitals have been repeatedly attacked by Israel, which accuses Hamas of using them for military purposes, a charge the militant group denies.
In the first six weeks of the war sparked by the Hamas attack, which killed more than 1,170 people according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures, “60 percent of health care facilities... were indicated as damaged or destroyed,” Scher said.
The territory’s largest hospital, Al-Shifa in Gaza City, was targeted in two offensives by the Israeli army, the first in November, the second in March.
The World Health Organization said the second operation reduced the hospital to an “empty shell” strewn with human remains.
Five hospitals have been completely destroyed, according to figures compiled by AFP from the OpenStreetMap project, the Hamas health ministry and the United Nations Satellite Center (UNOSAT). Fewer than one in three hospitals — 28 percent — are partially functioning, according to the UN.
The territory’s largely UN-run schools, where many civilians have sought refuge from the fighting, have also paid a heavy price.
As of April 25, UNICEF counted 408 schools damaged, representing at least 72.5 percent of its count of 563 facilities.
Of those, 53 school buildings have been completely destroyed and 274 others have been damaged by direct fire.
The UN estimates that two-thirds of the schools will need total or major reconstruction to be functional again.
Regarding places of worship, combined data from UNOSAT and OpenStreetMap show 61.5 percent of mosques have been damaged or destroyed.
The level of destruction in northern Gaza has surpassed that of the German city of Dresden, which was firebombed by Allied forces in 1945 in one of the most controversial Allied acts of World War II.
According to a US military study from 1954, quoted by the Financial Times, the bombing campaign at the end of World War II damaged 59 percent of Dresden’s buildings.
In late April, the head of the UN mine clearance program in the Palestinian territories, Mungo Birch, said there was more rubble to clear in Gaza than in Ukraine, which was invaded by Russia more than two years ago.
The UN estimated that as of the start of May, the post-war reconstruction of Gaza would cost between 30 billion and 40 billion dollars.