Israel hits Hezbollah targets in Syria, military says, amid war escalation

The Israeli army said early on Wednesday it had carried out bombardments on positions of the Lebanese group Hezbollah in Syria in a bid to thwart its "entrenchment" in the country.

Israel has exchanged cross-border fire with Hezbollah in Lebanon since it began waging its war in Gaza on October 7, as well as Syria, and has stepped strikes in recent weeks.

An Israeli Defence Force statement said the army had "struck military infrastructure that based on precise intelligence was used by the Hezbollah terrorist organisation on the Syrian front."

The military released a video of a strike against a building.

The army said it "holds the Syrian regime accountable for all activities which take place within its territory and will not allow for any attempted actions which could lead to the entrenchment of Hezbollah on the Syrian front."

"In parallel, in the past hours, the IDF struck a number of Hezbollah observation posts and terrorist infrastructure in southern Lebanon," the statement added.

"Throughout the day, IDF artillery struck to remove threats in the areas of Dhayra and Tayr Harfa in southern Lebanon."

On Tuesday, Israel said its warplanes had hit a Syrian military position in response to rocket fire from southern Syria on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group based in Britain, said Israeli jets staged raids in Syria on Tuesday and late Monday.

One destroyed a weapons and ammunition depot in the Daraa region of southern Syria while on Monday the raid hit a military site in the south used by groups backed by Iran and Hezbollah to fire rockets onto the Golan Heights, the observatory said.

The Israeli army has staged hundreds of strikes inside Syria since the country's civil war started in 2011, notably hitting pro-Iranian targets.

On April 1, an Israeli strike on an Iranian embassy consular building in Damascus killed 16 people including seven members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, according to the observatory. Israel has not commented on the attack.