Hezbollah, Israel trade heavy cross-border fire as Blinken seeks to prevent regional escalation

Israel and Hezbollah have traded fire in one of the heaviest days of cross-border fighting in recent weeks, a day after Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah urged retaliation for Israel's killing of a top Hamas leader in the suburbs of Lebanon's capital.

Nasrallah said that if his group didn't strike back for the killing Tuesday of Saleh Arouri, Hamas' deputy political leader, all of Lebanon would be vulnerable to Israeli attacks.

With the risk of regional escalation, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken kicked off an urgent Middle East diplomatic tour, his fourth since the Israel-Hamas war erupted three months ago.

"It is absolutely necessary to avoid Lebanon being dragged into a regional conflict," the European Union's foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, said in Beirut during his own Middle East tour.

Hezbollah said it launched 62 rockets toward an Israeli air surveillance base on Mount Meron and scored direct hits in its "initial response" to Arouri's killing. It said rockets also struck two army posts near the border. The Israeli military said about 40 rockets were fired toward Meron and that a base was targeted. The army's chief spokesperson, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said the rockets caused no casualties in Israel.

Hagari said the military struck the Hezbollah squads that fired the rockets and also attacked Hezbollah military sites. Hezbollah said six of its fighters were killed Saturday, raising the toll since the fighting began to 150.

Israeli airstrikes on southern Lebanon hit the outskirts of Kawthariyat al-Siyyad, a village about 40 kilometers from the border, Lebanon's state-run National News Agency said. Such strikes deeper inside Lebanon have been rare since the border fighting started nearly three months ago. NNA also said Israeli forces shelled border areas including the town of Khiam.

Separately, the armed wing of the Jamaa Islamiya in Lebanon, the country's branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and a close ally of Hamas, said it fired two volleys of rockets toward the Israeli city of Kiryat Shmona on Friday night. Two of the group's members were killed in the strike that killed Arouri.

Blinken began his latest Mideast trip in Turkey, which the Biden administration believes can exert influence, particularly on Iran and its proxies, to tamp down fears of a regional conflagration.

Those fears have spiked in recent days with incidents in the Red Sea, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran.