Israeli strike targets car on vital highway close to capital Beirut, one person killed

One person was killed and three others were injured on Thursday in an Israeli strike on a car on the vital Khaldeh highway on Beirut’s southern entrance, the country’s health ministry said.

“According to a preliminary toll, an Israeli airstrike on a car in Khaldeh resulted in one martyr and left three others injured,” the state-run National News Agency reported citing the healthy ministry.

For all the latest headlines, follow our Google News channel online or via the app.

The Israeli army said that it “conducted a raid in Lebanon” targeting a person it said “works in arms smuggling and advancing terrorist plots against Israeli citizens and [Israeli army] forces on behalf of Iran’s Quds Force,” the overseas arm of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Sources told Al Arabiya that the targeted person was named Qassem al-Husseini.

Social media videos showed a blue Hyundai car nearly destroyed.

A video on social media also showed the car stopping on the side of the road and people exiting the car just seconds before being struck.

The Khaldeh highway, south of Beirut, is one the vital roads in Lebanon and connects Beirut to the south.

Israel has repeatedly bombed its northern neighbor despite the November ceasefire that aimed to end over a year of hostilities with Hezbollah.

Under the ceasefire deal, Hezbollah was to pull its fighters back north of the Litani river, some 30 kilometers (20 miles) from the Israeli border, leaving the Lebanese army and United Nations peacekeepers as the only armed parties in the region.

Israel was required to fully withdraw its troops from the country but has kept them in five locations in south Lebanon that it deems strategic.

With AFP

Read more:

Israel’s normalization appeal elicits mixed responses in Syria, Lebanon

Lebanon drafts reply to US demand for Hezbollah to disarm, sources say