Two Israeli soldiers killed in Hezbollah attack

Exchange of fire between Hezbollah and Israel raises threat of full-blown conflict between militant group and Israel

JERUSALEM/ BEIRUT: Two Israeli soldiers and a Spanish peacekeeper were killed on Wednesday in an exchange of fire between Hezbollah and Israel that has raised the threat of a full-blown conflict between the militant group and Israel.

In the biggest escalation since a 2006 war, the soldiers were killed when Hezbollah fired a missile at a convoy of Israeli military vehicles on the frontier with Lebanon.

The peacekeeper, serving with a UN monitoring force in southern Lebanon, was killed as Israel responded with air strikes and artillery fire, a UN spokesman and Spanish officials said.

Hezbollah said one of its brigades in the area had carried out the attack, which appeared to be in retaliation for a January 18 Israeli air strike in southern Syria that killed several Hezbollah members and an Iranian general.

Tensions in the region, where the frontiers of Israel, Lebanon and Syria meet and militant groups opposed to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad are active, have been bubbling for months but have boiled over in the past 10 days. 

Published in The Express Tribune, January 29^th, 2015.