Two people were killed on Saturday in an Israeli strike which targeted the highway linking Beirut to northern Lebanon for the first time since the start of the war between Israel and Hezbollah, according to authorities.
Three rockets targeted a car in which a couple was traveling, near the Christian town of Jounieh, which has so far been spared the violence, the official ANI agency said.
“An Israeli enemy strike on a car in Jounieh left two dead,” the Health Ministry announced.
An AFP journalist saw Lebanese soldiers deployed in large numbers near the targeted car on this key highway. The windows of a nearby pastry shop and other businesses were broken.
“A strike first targeted the car but it was not hit,” an employee who witnessed the scene, who requested anonymity, told AFP.
The two people “got out of the vehicle” to flee, but “they were targeted again,” he added.
The strike occurred in an area far from Hezbollah’s traditional strongholds.
After a year of exchanges of border fire, Israel and the pro-Iranian Hezbollah are now at open war in Lebanon, where the Israeli army launched a ground offensive in the south on September 30.
“I was on my way to Beirut and I stopped to buy pastries,” Charbel Nakhoul told AFP. “We now expect everything. […] There is no longer any safe region, as long as displaced people from the south come to our region, it will be targeted,” he added.
More than a million people have been forced from their homes due to the war. Last week, 23 displaced people were killed by an Israeli raid on a Christian village in the north where they had taken refuge.
Israeli aircraft carried out raids overnight from Friday to Saturday against southern and eastern Lebanon, including the town of Chtaura, according to ANI.
Hezbollah, for its part, claimed responsibility for several attacks against northern Israel on Saturday.
The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Saturday that a drone had been launched towards his private residence in Caesarea in central Israel, without any casualties being reported.
