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BEIRUT (news agencies) — An Israeli drone strike hit a car near Lebanon’s southern port city of Sidon on Saturday, killing at least two people and wounding two others, security officials said.
The strike came as tensions across the Middle East grow with the Israel-Hamas war, a drone attack last month that killed three U.S. troops in northeastern Jordan near the Syrian border and attacks by Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels on vessels passing through the Red Sea.
The drone strike near the coastal town of Jadra took place about 60 kilometers (37 miles) from the Israeli border, making it one of the farthest inside Lebanon since violence erupted along the Lebanon-Israel border on Oct. 8, a day after Hamas’ attack in southern Israel.
An Israeli security official, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with regulations, said the target of the strike in Sidon was Hamas official Basel Saleh, who was “injured to an unknown extent.” The official said Saleh was responsible for enlistment of new Hamas recruits in Gaza and the West Bank.
The attack in Lebanon came as Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian met in Beirut with Lebanese leaders including the country’s caretaker prime minister, parliament speaker and the head of the militant Hezbollah group.
Amirabdollahian said that if the United States wants to bring stability to the region again, it should work on forcing Israel to end its military operations in the Gaza Strip.
He told reporters after meeting his counterpart Abdallah Bouhabib that after four months of war, Israel and its backers did not achieve “anything tangible.”
In an apparent reference to attacks by Iran-backed fighters in Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, Amirabdollahian said that “if American wants calm to prevail in the region, then the mechanism and the solution is to stop the genocide, crimes and the war against Gaza and the West Bank.”
He blasted Washington, saying the U.S. is working on two tracks, one of which is sending weapons to Israel “and participating in the genocide in Gaza” and at the same time speaking about reaching a political solution to the war.
Two Lebanese security officials said the strike damaged a car and killed two people, including one on a motorcycle. They spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.
Lebanese troops cordoned off the area.
Drone strikes in Lebanon blamed on Israel have so far killed several officials from Hezbollah as well as the Palestinian militant group Hamas. The previous farthest strike was the Jan. 2 attack that killed top Hamas official Saleh Arouri in Beirut.
The U.S. Central Command announced Saturday that the U.S. military conducted self-defense strikes against two mobile unmanned surface vessels, four anti-ship cruise missiles, and one mobile land attack cruise missile that were prepared to launch against ships in the Red Sea from Yemen.
The military said the missiles and an unmanned vessel in Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen presented an imminent threat to U.S. Navy ships and merchant vessels in the region.
Since November, the rebels have repeatedly targeted ships in the Red Sea over Israel’s offensive in Gaza. But they have frequently targeted vessels with tenuous or no clear links to Israel, imperiling shipping in a key route for trade among Asia, the Mideast and Europe.
In Syria, Israeli airstrikes hit several sites on the outskirts of the capital, Damascus, the Syrian military said Saturday.
The strikes came from the direction of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, Syrian state news agency SANA reported, citing an unnamed military official. It added that air defenses shot down some and those that landed resulted in “some material losses.”
Britain-based war monitor the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said one of the strikes hit a residential building west of the capital. It reported three unidentified people were killed. Earlier it said causalities could be “figures of non-Syrian nationalities.” The observatory said Saturday’s assault was the 10th apparent Israeli strike on Syrian territory since the beginning of the year.
There was no immediate comment from Israel.
Presumed Israeli strikes in Syria in the past have killed high-ranking figures with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and allied groups. In December, a strike on a Damascus neighborhood killed a high-ranking Iranian general, Seyed Razi Mousavi, a longtime adviser of the Iranian paramilitary Revolutionary Guard in Syria.
