The Israeli army announced Thursday, July 6, to carry out strikes in southern Lebanon following the explosion of a mortar fired, according to it, from this territory. This new border incident between Lebanon and Israel, two countries technically in a state of war, took place in the border area between Lebanon and the Syrian Golan territory occupied and annexed by Israel.

“A shot was fired from Lebanese territory and exploded next to the border in Israeli territory,” the Israeli army said in a statement, later telling Agence France-Presse (AFP) that it was was mortar fire. “In response, the army is currently striking the area from which the shooting was carried out in Lebanese territory,” the military statement added.

In Lebanon, the official ANI news agency reported that “an Israeli artillery bombardment was currently taking place around the locality of Kfarchouba”, reporting more than fifteen 155 mm caliber artillery shells.

The incident comes three months after the two countries experienced their biggest confrontation in years, after rockets were fired from Lebanon into Israel. It also takes place after a major Israeli military operation in the Palestinian territory of the West Bank, occupied by Israel for fifty-six years.

Conflict around the village of Ghajar

Earlier in the morning, Hezbollah denounced the Israeli decision to build a wall around the village of Ghajar, located between the part of the Syrian Golan occupied by Israel and Lebanon, calling for action to “prevent a consolidation of the occupancy”. After the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000, ending twenty-two years of occupation, the United Nations (UN) drew a blue line fixing the border between the two countries.

This line places the northern part of Ghajar in Lebanon and the southern part in the section of the Golan occupied and annexed by Israel. In a statement, the powerful Lebanese Shia party denounced the installation by the Israeli forces of “a barbed wire fence and the construction of a concrete wall around the entire locality”, which “separates this village from its environment. natural and historical within the Lebanese territory”.

Lebanese diplomacy on Tuesday denounced Israel’s attempt to annex the northern part of Ghajar, citing “serious threats to stability and the status quo”, a “flagrant violation of Security Council resolution 1701” of the UN, adopted after the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah.

Important Hezbollah maneuvers

Born after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Hezbollah, pro-Iranian, is the only Lebanese formation to have kept its armament since the end of the civil war (1975-1990), in the name of the “resistance” against Israel. At the end of May, it staged its largest maneuvers in years in southern Lebanon, unveiling heavy weapons and simulating attacks on Israeli territory, according to AFP correspondents there.

Some 200 hooded fighters had also simulated breaching the concrete wall erected by Israel at the border and had rushed into it. At the end of June, Hezbollah announced that it had shot down an Israeli drone that had entered Lebanese airspace near the border in the south of the country, the first in almost two years.

On Thursday, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), deployed in southern Lebanon to ensure the maintenance of the truce between the two countries, urged the parties “to show restraint and avoid any action likely to provoke a new escalation”.