Tensions boil after Israeli strikes kill at least four in Lebanon

Israeli artillery shelled Friday the southern border town of Houla and the outskirts of Kfarshouba and Kfarhamam, a day after Israeli strikes killed at least five people in Lebanon.

Hezbollah for its part attacked Friday, for the first time since war broke out, Abirim, Neve Ziv and Manot in north Israel in response to Israeli attacks on civilians in south Lebanon.

Hezbollah vowed in a statement that it would attack new settlements in the event of any attack on civilians.

The group also targeted a post in the occupied Kfarshouba Hills with a heavy rocket it said was made by Hezbollah fighters, and later targeted a group of soldiers in the Ramim barracks with a Burkan rocket, Metula with artillery shells and Israeli artillery positions in Kherbet Ma'er.

An Israeli strike on a house near the southern village of Jmaijmeh had killed two people and wounded eighteen Thursday, hours after two separate drone strikes in southern Lebanon and in the eastern Bekaa Valley killed a Hezbollah member and a commander of Hamas-allied al-Jamaa al-Islamiya.

Hezbollah said two of its members were among the dead in the Jmaijmeh strike, including Ali Jaafar Maatouq. A source close to the group described him as a commander of its elite Al Radwan operational unit.

The Israeli army said it killed another Al Radwan commander in Majdal Selm, near Jmaijmeh, which was not immediately confirmed by Lebanese sources. It announced Friday the death of a senior officer who was wounded in a Hezbollah strike on the Golan Heights two weeks ago.

- Retaliation -

Hezbollah carried out Thursday 9 attacks on Israeli positions in north Israel and the occupied Kfarshouba Hills, two of them in retaliation to the morning strikes on Bekaa's Ghazzeh and Tyre's Jbal el-Botm.

The group attacked with suicide drones a military base near Safad and a command center near Ya'ara in north Israel.

The cross-border violence since October has killed 516 people in Lebanon, according to an AFP tally. Most of the dead have been fighters, but they have also included at least 104 civilians.

On the Israeli side, 18 soldiers and 13 civilians have been killed, according to authorities.

The violence has raised fears of all-out conflict between the two foes, who last went to war in the summer of 2006.