Two mortar shells were fired at an Israel Defense Force outpost at the edge of the southern Lebanon security zone Sunday, causing no casualties.
The IDF responded with what it described as “controlled counterfiring.”
The exchange broke a nine-day lull in fighting along the northern border, which began with an undeclared truce on Feb. 21 between the IDF and the Shi’ite fundamentalist militia, Hezbollah.
Hezbollah had been firing Katyusha rockets into Upper Galilee since Feb. 16 in retaliation for the assassination of its leader, Sheik Abbas Musawi, for which Israel took responsibility.
The IDF and its allied South Lebanon Army replied with artillery barrages aimed at knocking out the rocket-launching sites.
The IDF subsequently sent ground forces into southern Lebanon, supported by tanks and combat helicopters to search out and destroy the mobile launchers. It lost two soldiers in a raid on a Lebanese village believed to be a Hezbollah base. The IDF then withdrew.
The Israelis claimed that the mortars were fired Sunday to conceal the failure of Hezbollah’s earlier Katyusha rocket attacks. Hezbollah spokesmen in Lebanon reportedly described the isolated firing as a “major battle against Israel.”
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