Israeli airstrikes killed two people in southern Lebanon on Wednesday night, Lebanese state media reported, while Hamas earlier fired rockets into northern Israel from Lebanese territory as hostilities on the border intensified.

“Enemy aircraft attacked the communities of Siddikin and Kafra, killing two residents in Kafra and injuring 14 others,” according to the Lebanese NNA news agency.

Lebanon’s Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas, has exchanged fire almost daily with the Israeli military since the outbreak of war between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist movement that rules the Gaza Strip on October 7. Branches of Palestinian organizations in Lebanon have also claimed responsibility for many attacks.

Yesterday Wednesday morning, Hamas’s military arm, the al-Qassam Brigades, announced that it fired two salvos of Grant rockets targeting two military installations in northern Israel.

The attacks from southern Lebanon were “retaliation for the Zionist massacres of civilians in the Gaza Strip” and the January 2 assassination of a Hamas official in Lebanese territory, it said.

Saleh Aruri was killed along with six other Hamas members in a drone attack attributed to Israel in a southern suburb of Beirut, a stronghold of Hezbollah.

The Israeli military announced in a statement that “about 10 launches” were detected from Lebanon against northern Israel and that air defense sirens sounded in the Kiryat Shimona district.

Air defense systems “succeeded in intercepting a certain number” of rockets, the text continued, adding that elements hit the points from which “the fire came” in Lebanon.

The Israeli police spoke of material damage in the area where Kiryat Simona is located, however no injuries.

On February 10, a senior Hamas official was injured in a drone strike that targeted his car, some 40 kilometers north of the Israel-Lebanon border.

Hezbollah, which is close to Iran, bombed an Israeli military base twice on Tuesday, retaliating for unprecedented strikes by the Israeli air force a day earlier in eastern Lebanon.

In the past nearly five months of hostilities, at least 286 people, mostly fighters from Hezbollah and other allied factions, as well as at least 44 civilians, have been killed in southern Lebanon, according to an AFP tally. They included some 24 fighters from Palestinian factions, including some 10 from Hamas,

In northern Israel, 16 people have been killed, ten members of the armed forces and six civilians, according to the army.

Tens of thousands of people have been displaced on both sides of the border.