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Gunfire Erupts on Israeli-Lebanon Border
ugandacBy BUTROS WANNA, Associated Press Writer KFAR KILA, Lebanon - Gunfire erupted across the Israel-Lebanese border Monday, with each side saying it was fired upon, amid tensions following Israel's airstrike on Lebanon's ally Syria.
The Israeli army said some of its troops were fired on near Kfar Kila, a village on the Lebanese side of the border some 60 miles southeast of Beirut.
Lebanese security officials and soldiers, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Israeli troops patrolling a road on the Israeli side of the electrified border fence fired at two Lebanese vehicles, a sedan and a passenger mini van. Shots also hit homes in Kfar Kila, but no one was harmed.
An independent Lebanese radio station, Voice of Lebanon, said one Israeli soldier was killed and two wounded. The unattributed report said was unclear if Hezbollah guerrillas or Palestinian militants were behind the shooting. The Israeli military did not say if any soldiers were killed or wounded.
The shooting came amid heightened tensions in the region after Israeli warplanes on Sunday bombed an alleged Palestinian militant base in Syria, the first Israeli strike deep in Syria in three decades. The strike was in retaliation for a Palestinian suicide bombing that killed 19 in the Israeli city of Haifa on Saturday. Syria dominates its neighbor Lebanon and has strong influence over the Shiite Muslim guerrilla group Hezbollah in the border region.
It was unclear what prompted Monday's shootings on a road abutting the fence separating Lebanon from Israel. Hezbollah, the anti-Israeli militant Lebanese guerrilla group active in south Lebanon, said in a one-sentence statement faxed to the AP in Beirut that it was not involved in Monday's shootings.
In Kfar Kala, the home of Sujud Faris, a 16-year-old Shiite Muslim girl, had fresh bullet holes in the walls.
"I was studying and suddenly shooting erupted, shattering glass at our home," Faris told The Associated Press. She and her younger brother and sister hid under the bed.
An officer from the U.N. Interim Force In Lebanon, a peacekeeping force that regularly sends patrols along the Lebanese side of the border, said a U.N. water tanker truck was hit by three bullets. There were no injuries.
A spokesman for the U.N. force confirmed there had been a shooting incident in the border area and that the force was investigating the matter.
Three white armored U.N. peacekeeping force vehicles took up positions near the place where the shooting occurred later Monday.
An electrified fence connected to cameras and movement sensors separates adjacent roads on both sides of the border. In the area where Monday's shootings occurred, houses in Kfar Kila are separated from the Israeli village of Metoulla in the northern Galilee by apple groves and a few dozen yards.
Shootings on the edge of this border town have been rare since the Israeli withdrawal, but violence sometimes flares in the contested Chebaa Farms, an area to the east, where shootouts between Israeli border guards and Hezbollah guerrillas occasionally flare into artillery and rocket exchanges, sometimes prompting Israeli air strikes.
Reporters and Lebanese soldiers who arrived at the scene about an hour after the shooting said Israeli soldiers yelled at them from their side of the fence and ordered them to leave the area.
One of the Lebanese soldiers replied, "This is Lebanese territory. We are not leaving," according to an Associated Press reporter at the scene
Israeli soldiers shouted back in Arabic, "go away before we shoot you," the reporter who witnessed the argument said. The
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