A Lebanese soldier was seriously wounded yesterday in the first Israeli air raid of this year on a Lebanese army position in the south of the Syrian-controlled eastern Bekaa Valley, Lebanese police said. The attacks was the latest in a series of escalating clashes this week.
The helicopters fired two air-to-ground missiles directly on the Lebanese post at Maidoun, less than a kilometre from the edge of the Israeli buffer zone in south Lebanon.
A military vehicle equipped with an anti-aircraft battery was hit and one of its occupants was seriously wounded, police said.
Earlier, Israeli aircraft raked with heavy machinegun fire the valleys in the Maidoun area, which is a stronghold of Lebanese Shia Hizbullah guerrillas, while Hizbullah and the Lebanese army responded with anti-aircraft batteries, police said, without mentioning casualties.
The Israeli aircraft took to the air immediately after the Iranian and Syrian-backed Hizbullah attacked an Israeli patrol and position at Bir Kallab in the Israeli-held buffer zone without inflicting casualties, security service officials in the area said.
During yesterday's fighting, a militiaman of the Israeli-allied South Lebanon Army (SLA) was killed in an attack by the Lebanese Shia Amal movement in revenge for Israel's assassination of a top Amal military commander on Tuesday.
The moderate Shia Muslim Amal claimed seven attacks against Israeli and SLA positions in the border area to avenge the killing of its military leader in south Lebanon in an Israeli air strike on Tuesday.
An Israeli helicopter gunship ambushed the vehicle on Tuesday carrying Hussam al-Amin, head of Amal's military operations in south Lebanon, in what the Israeli Defence Minister, Mr Yitzhak Mordechai, described as a planned assassination.
The Amal attacks came after Hizbullah guerrillas fired Katyusha rockets on Tuesday night on northern Israel, slightly wounding 12 Israelis.
In the worst cross-border attack on Israel in a year, hospital and military officials said 10 civilians and two soldiers were slightly hurt and several houses and vehicles damaged by the Katyusha attacks.
The Islamic Resistance, Hizbullah's military wing, said in a statement that the Katyusha shelling was "in retaliation for Israeli aggression on cities and villages in Lebanon". Israel threatened new strikes against Lebanese "terrorist organisations" yesterday.
Israel has occupied a strip of southern Lebanon since 1985. Rising casualties have led to calls in Israel for a unilateral withdrawal from the buffer zone.