Lebanon's Hezbollah guerrilla group struck Israeli posts in a disputed border area on Friday, witnesses said, six days after a Hezbollah member was killed in a car bomb in the group's Beirut stronghold.
Israeli warplanes responded with heavy airstrikes on the eastern, western and southern edges of the nearby Lebanese border village of Kfar Shouba, witnesses said.
They said Hezbollah fighters fired dozens of mortar rounds, rockets and machineguns at about three Israeli posts in the Shebaa Farms area, near the border between Israel, Lebanon and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, setting an Israeli radar position ablaze. There was no immediate word of casualties.
Hezbollah returned fire at the Israeli planes overhead.
Hezbollah claimed responsibility for the attack, its first in the Shebaa Farms area since January. It was launched by a cell named after Ali Hussein Saleh, who was killed in a car bomb in the southern suburbs of Beirut on Saturday.
"The martyr Ali Hussein Saleh's groups in the Islamic Resistance attacked ... Zionist enemy positions at the radar, Rouweissat al-Alam and al-Sammaqa using live and rocket weapons and hit them directly," said a Hezbollah statement faxed to reporters.
The Shiite Muslim group had blamed 42-year-old Saleh's killing on Israel and vowed revenge.
Hezbollah, which helped end Israel's 22-year occupation of south Lebanon in 2000, had not attacked Israeli troops in the Shebaa Farms since January. It had routinely attacked Israeli posts in the area following the 2000 withdrawal.
Hezbollah, along with Lebanon and its powerbroker Syria, say the Shebaa Farms is Lebanese territory, but the UN deems Israel's pullout from Lebanon complete and considers the area Israeli-occupied Syrian land.
Meanwhile, in the West bank,
Israeli soldiers hunting a top fugitive from the militant Islamic Hamas group battled gunmen in a refugee camp Friday, killing one Palestinian, the military and witnesses said.
Friday's gunbattle, before dawn, centered on a three-story apartment building in the Askar refugee camp, next to the northern West Bank city of Nablus. An army spokesman said a force searching for a Hamas leader came under fire from the building and shot backV.
The battle came after a month of relative calm that followed a cease-fire declared by the main Palestinian groups on June 29. Though the truce has dramatically reduced the level of violence that had held during nearly three years of violence, the Israeli military continues to send forces into West Bank towns and refugee camps nightly to arrest Palestinian terror suspects.
Israeli soldiers fired an anti-tank missile at the building's third floor, setting off several explosions. The military said that the source of the blasts was either a crude explosives lab or a stash of weapons.
Palestinian witnesses said one person, apparently a gunman firing at the soldiers from the roof of the building, was killed. They said Israeli forces evacuated Palestinian families from the structure, which began to collapse and burn.
The army said soldiers were still searching for the target of the raid, a senior Hamas militant, but would not name him. Residents of the camp said the man being sought might be Khamis Abu Salem, 23, a fugitive from the Hamas military wing, who rented a room as a hide-out in the building.
Also Friday, an Israeli government source speaking on condition of anonymity said that Israel could alter the route of a series of fences, trenches, razor wire and a wall that is being built between Israel and the West Bank.
Israel says the barrier is meant to keep suicide bombers and other attackers out of Israel, but the Palestinians are angered because parts of the winding fence plunge deep into the West Bank to include some Jewish settlements on the ``Israeli" side of the barrier.
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