2024-07-29 08:46:32
Lebanon today called for an international investigation into yesterday’s rocket attack on the annexed Golan Heights, which Israel blamed on Hezbollah, and warned that an Israeli attack on Lebanon could trigger a regional conflict, reported AFP.
Israel said a rocket fired from Lebanon yesterday at a soccer field in the Druze village of Majdal Shams killed 12 youths between the ages of 10 and 16, wounded about 30 others, and left another 13-year-old child missing.
According to Israel, it is an Iranian Falak-type missile with a 53-kilogram warhead. According to Israel’s Foreign Ministry, Hezbollah, which denies responsibility for the attack, is the only faction in possession of such a missile.
In a statement carried by the official National News Agency (NNA), Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib called for “an international investigation or tripartite commission meeting with the mediation of the UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon (UNIFIL) to establish the truth” of the attack .
The tripartite commission brings together military officials from Lebanon and Israel – two countries that are technically at war – and representatives of the UN Interim Peacekeeping Force stationed in southern Lebanon, BTA reports.
The minister dismissed the possibility that the influential Hezbollah group, which dominates political life in Lebanon, had deliberately targeted civilians, saying that since the start of the Gaza war in October it had only targeted “military positions”.
He believes the attack may have been “perpetrated by other organizations” or “the fault of Israel or Hezbollah”.
The minister called on both sides to implement UN Resolution 1701, adopted after the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel, which stipulates that only the Lebanese Army and the United Nations Interim Peacekeeping Force (UNIFIL) will be deployed in southern Lebanon.
A “large-scale attack on Lebanon will escalate tensions in the region and provoke a regional war,” he warned, while Israel threatened to make Hezbollah pay a “heavy price.”
Proclaiming its support for Hamas, the pro-Iranian Hezbollah group has exchanged fire daily with the Israeli army on the Lebanon-Israel border since the start of the Gaza war, triggered by the Palestinian Islamist movement’s attack on Israeli territory on October 7.
Since October 8, at least 527 people have been killed in an exchange of fire along the Israeli-Lebanese border in Lebanon, most of them Hezbollah fighters, but also 104 Lebanese civilians, according to AFP data. On the Israeli side, according to the authorities, 22 soldiers and 24 civilians were killed.