Lebanese militant group Hezbollah said it launched a drone attack on northern Israel that the Israeli military said had wounded two Israeli troops.
The fresh violence on Monday (Tuesday AEST) came amid fears of an all-out regional war following the killings last week of a senior Hezbollah commander in Lebanon and Hamas’ top political leader in Iran.
The Iranian-backed Hezbollah said it targeted a military base in northern Israel in response to “attacks and assassinations” by Israel in several villages in southern Lebanon. The attack did not appear to be the more intense retaliation that’s expected from Iran and its allied militias.
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Israel and Hezbollah have exchanged near-daily strikes for the past 10 months during the war in Gaza.
But last week’s assassinations of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Iran’s capital and Hezbollah commander Fouad Shukur in Beirut pushed regional tensions to the brink.
The head of Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard threatened Israel on Monday over the assassination of Haniyeh, warning that Israel was “digging its own grave” with its actions against Hamas.
Israel’s defence minister said the military was ready for a “swift transition to offence.”
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It comes as a leading Israeli human rights group accused Israeli authorities of abusing and torturing Palestinian detainees, as scrutiny of Israel’s treatment of Palestinian prisoners during the Israel-Hamas war mounts.
The group, B’Tselem, said it conducted interviews with 55 Palestinian inmates from Gaza, the West Bank and east Jerusalem after their release. It said they described a list of abuses at the hands of Israeli prison guards including violence, sexual assault, starvation and sleep deprivation.
Israel’s prison service did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the report. The military denies abuse at the facilities under its auspices and says detainees are granted basic rights.
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B’Tselem’s findings come a week after the United Nations human rights office issued its own report which detailed similar findings about the treatment of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli-run prisoners since the outbreak of the war.
Thirty of the inmates B’Tselem spoke with were from the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem, 21 were from the Gaza Strip, while four others were Palestinian citizens of Israel, according to Monday’s report.
The report included testimony from Sde Teiman, a shadowy desert military facility which most of the detainees from Gaza have passed through. The military is currently investigating alleged abuse against a detainee from Sde Teiman.
Over the past ten months, the number of Palestinian detainees held in Israeli prisons has nearly doubled from just over 5,000 to almost 10,000, according to HaMoked, an Israeli rights group that regularly gathers figures from prison authorities. The rise has been partly fueled by an influx of some 1,500 detainees from Gaza, according to HaMoked’s figures
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