SIDON: An Israeli airstrike hit two vehicles near a Lebanese army checkpoint in south Lebanon on Sunday, killing a Hezbollah member in one car and a woman in the other and wounding several other people, Lebanese state media and health officials reported.The strike appeared to be part of a shift in Israeli strategy toward targeted killings in Lebanon after more than three months of near-daily clashes with Hezbollah militants on the border against the backdrop of the war in Gaza.Hezbollah announced that one of its members, identified as Fadel Shaar, had been killed in the strike in the town of Kafra.Several hours later, Lebanon’s National News Agency reported that a civilian woman wounded in the strike, Samar al-Sayyed Mohammed, had died of her injuries.Local civil defense and hospital officials said several others were wounded.Video from the scene showed a passenger sedan in flames next to a small truck stopped in the middle of the road.The Israeli military did not comment on the strike.Since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war on Oct. 7, Hezbollah forces have engaged in near-daily clashes with Israeli troops along the border.While the clashes had previously been limited mainly to a narrow strip within a few kilometers (miles) from the border, Israel in recent weeks appears to have moved to a strategy of targeted killings of figures from Hezbollah and allied groups, sometimes hitting in areas relatively far from the border, as was the case in Sunday’s strike.On Saturday, another strike near the Lebanese port city of Tyre killed two people in a car — one of them a Hezbollah commander — and two people in a nearby orchard. The commander, Ali Hudruj, was buried Sunday in south Lebanon. The other occupant of the car, tech sector businessman Mohammad Baqir Diab, was identified as a civilian and was buried in Beirut on Sunday.
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