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Lebanon says Israeli strikes kill 7 as Hezbollah condemns talks
Israeli strikes killed seven people in Lebanon on Sunday, including an Islamic Jihad commander, Lebanese authorities and state media said, despite a fragile ceasefire as Hezbollah called US-brokered talks between the two countries a "dead end".
The health ministry published a "preliminary toll" for Israel's strikes on Sunday, with three people killed in the town of Tayr Felsay, including a child, and two killed in the town of Tayr Debba, including another child.
It said 11 people were wounded in those strikes and four more were wounded in strikes in two other southern towns.
Later Lebanon's state-run National News Agency (NNA) said an Israeli missile strike around midnight on an apartment on the outskirts of the city of Baalbek in the country's east had killed Islamic Jihad commander Wael Abdel Halim and his 17-year-old daughter.
Despite the ceasefire, Israel continues to strike widely in southern Lebanon and issues frequent evacuation warnings to towns and villages across the south.
Two Israeli strikes also hit the town of Sohmor in eastern Lebanon's Bekaa valley on Sunday, the state-run NNA said.
The Israeli army later issued an evacuation warning to four villages near the southern coastal city of Sidon, dozens of kilometres from the border area, which were also subject to an evacuation warning on Saturday.
Israeli airstrikes hit three of the four villages following the warning, the NNA said.
- Washington talks -
Speaking at the start of a cabinet meeting on Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel was "holding territory, clearing territory, protecting Israel's communities, but also fighting an enemy that is trying to outsmart us".
"We are facing the challenge of neutralising FPV (First-Person view) drones," he said, as Hezbollah has increasingly made use of the drones to strike Israeli forces.
The latest exchanges of fire came after envoys from Israel and Lebanon held a third round of negotiations in Washington and agreed to extend the ceasefire, talks that Iran-backed Hezbollah has repeatedly denounced.
"The direct negotiations that the authorities in Lebanon have conducted with the Israeli enemy have... led them down a dead-end path that will result in nothing but one concession after another," Hezbollah lawmaker Hussein Hajj Hassan said on Sunday.
"Neither they nor anyone else will be able to carry out what the enemy wants, especially when it comes to the issue of disarming the resistance," he said, adding that authorities were creating "very big predicaments" for the country.
In a statement on Saturday, the group called the proposed establishment of a US-facilitated security track a fresh addition "to the series of free concessions" the Lebanese government "offers the enemy".
On Saturday the group also said it had struck a military target in northern Israel, having earlier announced several operations against Israeli forces in southern Lebanon.
Israel sent ground forces into southern Lebanon during the latest war and they continue to occupy territory near the border between the two countries.
Israeli attacks since the start of the war have killed more than 2,900 people in Lebanon, including more than 400 since the truce began on April 17, according to Lebanese authorities.
M.Joo--SG
