Hezbollah doesn’t want conflict: Lebanon-Israel border calm

JERUSALEM: Israel buried Thursday two soldiers killed in a Hezbollah missile strike that triggered Israeli fire on southern Lebanon, raising tensions between the bitter enemies to their highest in years.

But the Israeli-Lebanese border was calm, and Israeli officials played down the threat of a new war with the powerful Iran-backed Shiite group’s mili- tia. In an unusual declaration, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon said Hezbollah had passed on a message through the UN peacekeeping mission in southern Lebanon saying it did not want a further escalation.

“We have received a message... that, from their point of view, the incident is over,” he told public radio.

Analysts say neither side seems keen for a repeat of the devastating Israel-Hezbollah conflict in 2006 and that any response is likely to be limited. The two soldiers were killed when Hezbollah fired anti-tank missiles at a convoy in an Israeli-occupied area on the border with Lebanon.

Israeli forces responded to the attack — which came in retaliation for an Israeli strike on the Golan Heights that killed senior Hezbollah members — with artillery, tank and air fire on several villages in southern Lebanon.

There were no reports of Lebanese casualties, but a 36-year-old Spanish peacekeeper with UNIFIL was killed in the exchange of fire.

In Israel, farmers were tending apple orchards close to the border fence, an AFP photographer said. Schools had reopened, as had the Mount Hermon ski resort in the Israeli-occupied portion of the Golan Heights.

In the Lebanese border village of Majidiya, residents were collecting spent artillery shells from Wednesday’s strikes, an AFP photographer said.