BEIRUT—Lebanese militant group Hezbollah struck an Israeli armored patrol with a roadside bomb at the border on Monday and Israel responded by shelling the area, with no immediate word on casualties.
Hezbollah said the attack was carried out by a unit named for Samir Kantar, a prominent Lebanese militant killed in Syria last month. Hezbollah had blamed Israel and vowed to avenge his death, suggesting a possible motivation for Monday’s attack.
Hezbollah said it set off a large explosive device as the vehicles passed in the disputed Chebaa Farms area, destroying a Humvee and causing casualties among the soldiers inside.
The Israeli army said vehicles in the area were hit with an improvised explosive device and that it responded with targeted artillery fire. It did not say whether there were any casualties.
Hezbollah’s television channel Al-Manar said one of the vehicles targeted was carrying “a senior officer.”
Tensions on the border have been high since Kantar, who carried out a notorious attack in Israel and spent nearly 30 years in an Israeli jail, was killed in Syria by an airstrike late last month.
Border skirmishes between Israel and Hezbollah have quickly escalated into all-out war in the past, with one cross-border raid by the group in 2006 touching off a month-long Israeli offensive that included a ground invasion and airstrikes that reached across all of Lebanon.
But with Hezbollah currently engaged in the Syrian civil war on the side of President Bashar Assad, and Israel free to target the group in porous Syrian airspace, both sides seem too occupied elsewhere to opt for a new war in Lebanon.
