Three killed, 54 wounded in Israeli strikes on Qana

Israeli strikes have killed at least 3 people in the southern town of Qana, which has long been associated with civilian deaths after Israeli strikes during previous conflicts with Hezbollah.

The Health Ministry said 54 people were wounded in the strike and that rescue efforts were still underway.

In 1996, Israeli artillery shelling on a United Nations compound housing hundreds of displaced people in Qana killed at least 100 civilians and wounded scores more, including four U.N. peacekeepers. During the 2006 war, an Israeli strike on a residential building killed nearly three dozen people, a third of them children. Israel said at the time that it struck a Hezbollah rocket launcher behind the building.

“Qana always gets its share,” Mayor Mohammed Krasht told the AP, referring to the town’s grim history.

Hezbollah began firing rockets into Israel on Oct. 8 in solidarity with Gaza, following the surprise Hamas attack on southern Israel that triggered the war. A year of low-level fighting along the Israel-Lebanon border escalated into all-out war last month, and has displaced some 1.2 million people in Lebanon.

Some 2,300 people have been killed by Israeli strikes in Lebanon since last October, more than three-quarters of them in the past month, according to Lebanon's Health Ministry.

Hezbollah's rocket attacks, which have extended their range and grown more intense over the past month, have driven around 60,000 Israelis from their homes in the north. The attacks have killed nearly 60 people in Israel, around half of them soldiers.

Hezbollah has said it will keep up its attacks until there is a cease-fire in Gaza, but that appears increasingly remote after months of negotiations brokered by the United States, Egypt and Qatar sputtered to a halt last month.

Israel, which has been carrying out ground operations along the border, has vowed to continue its offensive until its citizens can safely return to communities near the border.