Three Hezbollah militants were killed in Israeli air strikes near two towns in northeast Lebanon on Tuesday, the group posted on Telegram, the furthest bombardment yet from the border where Hezbollah and Israel have exchanged fire.

Israel confirmed the strikes near Ras Baabelk and Hermel and said its aircraft targeted a number of military sites used by Hezbollah in response to a rocket attack on one of its bases near the Lebanese border.

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Incoming rocket alerts sounded in northern Israel throughout Tuesday.

Hezbollah later said it had targeted an Israeli military barracks in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, immediately to the east of northern Israel, with 50 rockets in response to Israel’s strikes on the Bekaa Valley.

“Today the enemy is trying to expand its attacks against civilians in Baalbek, in the western Bekaa or elsewhere,” Hezbollah’s deputy chief Naim Qassem said Sunday.

“There will be responses to each of them.”

Earlier Sunday, an Israeli strike on a car near the Syrian border killed a man, a security source said, after overnight fire also in Lebanon’s east wounded four people, a second security official said.

“Israeli aircraft targeted a vehicle in... Suwairi, killing its Syrian driver,” the security source told AFP, requesting anonymity because of security concerns.

Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency (NNA) said the driver killed by the strike had been delivering food in a car that belonged to a supermarket owner.

Images from the scene showed a blue vehicle shredded and burned, with a streak of blood on the ground nearby.

Overnight Saturday, Israeli jets struck a Hezbollah center that had been deserted for some time in the Baalbek area, the second security source told AFP, adding four people were wounded.

Dozens of rockets

The strike at al-Osseira, about 100 kilometres (62 miles) from the Israel-Lebanon border, ended a period of relative calm that had lasted around 10 days.

The Israeli military said in a statement that its fighter jets “struck a Hezbollah manufacturing site containing weapons in the area of Baalbek,” the main city in the Bekaa Valley.

Later, Hezbollah said it fired “more than 60 Katyusha-type rockets” at two Israeli military positions in the occupied Golan Heights in response to the Israeli strikes.

The Israeli military said, “approximately 50 launches were identified from Lebanon toward northern Israel,” but it did not indicate any victims or damage.

Hezbollah and the Israeli army have been trading fire since October in the worst cross-border violence since they fought a month-long war in 2006.

The shelling had mostly been limited to strips of land straddling either side of the disputed frontier but has expanded recently, with Israel striking in the eastern Bekaa Valley and even further north on Tuesday.

Hezbollah says it will only end its attacks on Israel if there is a ceasefire in Gaza.

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Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant warned in February that a possible truce in Gaza would not affect Israel’s “objective” of pushing Hezbollah back from its northern border, by force or diplomacy.

At least 326 people have been killed in Lebanon, most of them Hezbollah fighters but including more than 50 civilians, according to an AFP count.

At least 10 soldiers and seven civilians have been killed in northern Israel, according to the military.

Tens of thousands of people have been displaced in southern Lebanon and northern Israel.

With agencies

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Israel strikes east Lebanon’s Baalbek, at least three wounded