Israel says it struck Hezbollah weapons smuggling sites along Syria-Lebanon border
Israeli aircraft struck Hezbollah weapons smuggling sites along Syria's border with Lebanon, the Israeli military said Saturday, testing a fragile, days-old ceasefire that has seen continued sporadic fire.
The military said it struck sites that had been used to smuggle weapons from Syria into Lebanon after the ceasefire took effect, which the military said was a violation of its terms. There was no immediate comment from Syrian authorities or Hezbollah.
Israeli aircraft have struck Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, citing ceasefire violations, several times since the truce began on Wednesday.
The ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah does not address the war in Gaza, where fighting rages on.
An Israeli airstrike on a car in the Gaza Strip on Saturday killed five people, including employees of World Central Kitchen. The charity said it was "urgently seeking more details" after Israel's military said it targeted a WCK worker who was part of the Hamas attack that sparked the war.
The Israeli military in a statement said the alleged Oct. 7 attacker took part in the assault on the kibbutz of Nir Oz, and it asked "senior officials from the international community" and the WCK to clarify how he had come to work for the charity.
The family of the man named by Israel, Ahed Azmi Qdeih, rejected the allegations as "false accusations," and confirmed in a statement he had worked with the charity. Israel named him as Hazmi Kadih.
In a statement to CBS News, the charity said it was "heartbroken" about the incident and is pausing operations in Gaza.
"At this time, we are working with incomplete information and are urgently seeking more details," it said. "World Central Kitchen had no knowledge that any individual in the vehicle had alleged ties to the October 7th Hamas attack."
It added: "Our hearts are with our colleagues and their families in this unimaginable moment."
An eyewitness told CBS News that when two rescue workers came to recover the bodies, they were killed in a second strike. Among the dead was Azem Abu Daqa, who is said to have run one of the charity's kitchens.
At Nasser Hospital in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, a woman held up an employee badge bearing the WCK logo, the word "contractor" and the name of one of the men said to have been killed in the strike. A heap of belongings — burned phones, a watch and stickers with the WCK logo — lay splayed on the hospital floor.
This is the second time World Central Kitchen has been hit in an Israeli strike. In April, a strike on a convoy killed seven staff members, most of them foreigners. The Israeli military said it was a mistake.
The truce between Israel and the Iran-backed Hezbollah, brokered by the United States and France, calls for an initial two-month ceasefire in which the militants are to withdraw north of Lebanon's Litani River and Israeli forces are to return to their side of the border.
The repeated bursts of violence — with no reports of serious casualties — reflected the uneasy nature of the ceasefire that otherwise appeared to hold. While Israel has accused Hezbollah of violating the ceasefire, Lebanon has also accused Israel of the same in the days since it took effect.
Many Lebanese, some of the 1.2 million displaced in the conflict, were streaming south to their homes, despite warnings by the Israeli and Lebanese militaries to stay away from certain areas.
The military said earlier Saturday that its forces, who remain in southern Lebanon until they withdraw gradually over the 60-day period, had been operating to distance "suspects" in the region, without elaborating, and said troops had located and seized weapons found hidden in a mosque.
Israel says it reserves the right under the ceasefire to strike against any perceived violations.
Hezbollah began attacking Israel on Oct. 8, 2023, in solidarity with the Palestinian militant group Hamas and its assault on southern Israel the day before. Israel and Hezbollah kept up a low-level conflict of cross-border fire for nearly a year, until Israel escalated its fight with a sophisticated attack that detonated hundreds of pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah fighters.
More than 3,760 people have been killed by Israeli fire in Lebanon during the conflict, many of them civilians, according to Lebanese health officials. The fighting killed more than 70 people in Israel — over half of them civilians — as well as dozens of Israeli soldiers fighting in southern Lebanon.
The war in Gaza was triggered by Hamas' October 2023 attack, when militants killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians and took some 250 hostages. Israel's retaliatory offensive has killed more than 44,000 Palestinians, according to local health officials, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants in their count but say more than half the dead were women and children.