Three UN peacekeepers lightly injured in south Lebanon ‘explosion’

BEIRUT: Three United Nations peacekeepers suffered light injuries on Sunday (Aug 18), the UN said, after a blast near their vehicle close to Lebanon’s southern border, where Hezbollah and Israel have traded near-daily fire.
The Iran-backed Hezbollah group has exchanged cross-border fire with the Israeli army in support of ally Hamas since the Palestinian militant group’s Oct 7 attack on Israel sparked the Gaza war.
“Earlier today, three peacekeepers on patrol were lightly injured when an explosion occurred near their clearly marked UN vehicle in the vicinity of Yarine, in south Lebanon,” the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) said in a statement.
“All peacekeepers in the patrol returned safely to their base. We are looking into the incident,” it added.
Earlier on Sunday, Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency had reported that “Israeli enemy warplanes” struck the village of Dhayra, about 1km from Yarine, “resulting in injuries”.
A UNIFIL source told AFP the explosion that injured the peacekeepers was probably a nearby air strike, but “not a direct hit”.
Earlier in August, Under-Secretary-General for Peace Operations Jean-Pierre Lacroix told AFP that UNIFIL was today “more important than ever” amid the ongoing cross-border clashes, because it was “the only liaison channel between the Israeli side and the Lebanese side in all its components, such as Hezbollah”.
In April, a judicial official told AFP that an ongoing Lebanese army investigation determined that a landmine wounded three UN military observers and a translator the previous month, while Israel implicated Hezbollah.
UNIFIL’s mandate, which expires at the end of the month, is set to be renewed by the UN Security Council for another year.
Lebanon’s health ministry on Sunday said a person was killed and another injured “in an Israeli airstrike” that targeted a motorcycle in the town of Shebaa in southern Lebanon.
The Lebanese Resistance Brigades, a group affiliated with Hezbollah, said one of its fighters was “martyred defending Lebanon and supporting the resistance in Gaza”, without specifying where.
Hezbollah later said it launched Katyusha rockets at a military post in northern Israel in response “to the attack and assassination carried out by the Israeli enemy in the town of Shebaa”.
The cross-border violence has killed 582 people in Lebanon, mostly Hezbollah fighters but including at least 128 civilians, according to an AFP tally.
On the Israeli side, including in the annexed Golan Heights, 22 soldiers and 26 civilians have been killed, according to army figures.