News - Middle East: The Israeli military has claimed the lives of three people in southern Lebanon during separate airstrikes after threatening to resume “wide-scale” aggression against the country.

The fatalities were caused on Saturday, with Lebanon’s official National News Agency (NNA) identifying two of them as brothers from the town of Shebaa, who were driving on a road on the slopes of Mt Hermon in the country’s southeast.

The strikes targeting the victims “caused their SUV to catch fire and resulting in their deaths,” the report added.

Lebanon’s health ministry confirmed the death toll and later reported that another strike on a car in the village of Baraashit had killed another person and wounded four.

The military alleged that the aggression had targeted people affiliated with the country’s Hezbollah resistance movement.

It claimed that the victims were posing threats to a ceasefire signed between the regime and the group in 2024 towards ending Tel Aviv’s escalated atrocities against the country.

Ever since conclusion of the accord, the regime has been using similar excuses towards taking Lebanon under fresh strikes.

Earlier too, the NNA had reported injury of seven people during an Israeli drone attack on a vehicle in the southern Lebanese city of Bint Jbeil.

The casualties were caused less than a week after the regime’s Maariv newspaper quoted the Israeli military as warning it “will carry out a wide-scale operation” in Lebanon in case of, what it called, a Hezbollah attack.

The report reiterated Tel Aviv’s justification for its underway near-daily attacks, saying the military was currently carrying out “attrition warfare” against Hezbollah.

Tel Aviv has, meanwhile, been applying markedly intensified pressure through the United States, its biggest ally, on Beirut to disarm Hezbollah.

The group, which has defended the country in the face of several major Israeli wars across decades, has roundly rejected laying down its weapons, saying it would sustain its defensive role as long as the nation was threatened by Israeli occupation and aggression.

Source: Press TV