Family members grieve the day after nine people were killed in an Israeli airstrike on the southern Lebanese village of Jibshit, during their funeral in the city of Sidon on Sunday. | — AFP photo
Lebanon’s health ministry said two paramedics from the Hezbollah-affiliated Islamic Health Committee were killed and five others wounded on Sunday in Israeli strikes on the country’s south despite a ceasefire.
A ministry statement said that Israel ‘directly targeted, with two strikes, two Health Committee sites’, killing one paramedic and wounding three others in Qalaway, and killing another paramedic and wounding two others in Tibnin.
The statement decried Israel’s continued ‘violation of international laws’.
Israel has kept up strikes despite a ceasefire in place since April 17 that was supposed to halt hostilities with Hezbollah.
The Iran-backed militant group has kept up its own attacks, mainly on Israeli troops operating in south Lebanon but also across the border.
Israel strikes have expanded in recent days, while Lebanon’s health ministry has raised the overall toll since war erupted to around 2,800 dead, including more than 100 health and emergency workers.
Israeli strikes have killed dozens of people in Lebanon since the ceasefire.
Under the terms of the truce released by Washington, Israel reserves the right to act against ‘planned, imminent or on-going attacks’.
Its troops are operating in an Israeli-announced ‘yellow line’ around 10 kilometres deep running inside Lebanon’s border, where residents have been warned not to return.
On Saturday, Lebanon’s National News Agency reported heavy Israeli strikes in various parts of Lebanon including one that killed seven people, and several raids around 20 kilometres south of Beirut outside Hezbollah’s traditional strongholds.
Lebanon and Israel are preparing to hold a third round of talks on May 14-15 in Washington, with veteran Lebanese diplomat Simon Karam recently appointed by president Joseph Aoun to lead his country’s delegation.
A first landmark meeting between the countries, which have no diplomatic relations, was held days before US president Donald Trump announced the ceasefire, while the second round came as he announced a three-week truce extension.
Hezbollah drew Lebanon into the Middle East conflict on March 2 when it launched rockets at Israel to avenge the killing of Iran’s supreme leader in US-Israeli strikes.
Meanwhile, the Lebanese army said on Sunday that it had arrested an Iraqi national for impersonating an Iraqi security official in Lebanon, the second alleged high-level imposter caught in recent months.
A military source said that the man had managed to network with Lebanese security and intelligence officials, telling them he worked at Iraq’s Beirut embassy.
The scandals have highlighted the fragility of Lebanon’s institutions, which are built on a sect-based power-sharing system in a country rife with foreign interference, and where personal connections often play a key role in gaining influence, money and privilege.
An army statement said the Iraqi man was arrested ‘for impersonating an Iraqi security official on Lebanese territory, as a result of a surveillance and security follow-up operation’.
Preliminary investigations indicate that the man was using ‘forged documents’, the statement said, adding that the military uniform he had been using was seized.
The military source said that the man ‘is married to a Lebanese woman and managed to get close to an intelligence official in Beirut, presenting himself as an Iraqi officer in the counter-terrorism branch, and a security attache at the Iraqi embassy’.
The Lebanese intelligence official allegedly helped the man ‘make contact with security and military officials and meet them’, the source said.
The suspect actually works at a popular cafe on the airport road in Beirut’s southern suburbs, the source added, after he started out there doing valet parking.
It is the second recent high-level impersonation case to rock Lebanon.
For months, authorities have been investigating an imposter who posed as a Saudi prince, extorting several politicians with the help of a religious figure.
A former prime minister and several other politicians, most of them Sunni Muslim, were caught up in the scandal that exposed the country’s deep-rooted corruption.
The military source said that in the latest case, preliminary investigations into the man and those who met him have not yet uncovered a motive, adding that during the meetings ‘he promised to provide financial assistance from Iraq’.
The case’s seriousness owes to the man’s ability to ‘convince intelligence officers of his fake identity’, the source added.