Israeli jets hit shopping centre in Lebanon While death toll in Gaza nears 30,000 / VIDEO

Israeli jets attacked a shopping centre and an apartment building between the Lebanese villages of Kafra and Siddiqin.

The strike killed two people (a man and a woman) and wounded several others, Al Manar reported.

Earlier, the IDF press service reported that IDF aircraft targeted Hezbollah terrorist infrastructure in the villages of Kafra and Siddiqin in southern Lebanon.

Since October 8, Hezbollah has been trading fire with the Israeli military across Lebanon’s southern border in support of its Palestinian ally Hamas, which launched a devastating assault on Israel on October 7.

Officials close to US President Joe Biden are concerned that Israel is planning to launch a ground operation against Hezbollah in Lebanon in the coming months.

According to the report, the Biden administration has held intelligence briefings on the matter, preparing for the possibility that the Iran-backed Hezbollah terror group cannot be made to retreat from the border through diplomatic measures.

Speaking to CNN on the condition of anonymity, one official says that the Biden administration is “operating in the assumption that an Israeli military operation is in the coming months.”

The official adds that it does not expect an operation to be imminent “in the next few weeks” but “perhaps later this spring.”

Israeli strikes also caused damage to sites near Damascus Wednesday night, Syria’s defence ministry said, in what appeared to be the latest attack in an intensified campaign against Iran-backed forces in the country.

“The Israeli enemy launched air strikes from the direction of the occupied Syrian Golan, targeting a number of sites in the Damascus countryside,” the ministry said in a statement carried by state media.

It claimed that most missiles were shot down, a regular assertion on alleged Israeli strikes that analysts are generally sceptical of.

Meanwhile, Israeli officials said on February 28 that aid convoys carrying food reached northern Gaza this week, the first major delivery in a month to the devastated, isolated area, where the U.N. has warned of worsening starvation among hundreds of thousands of Palestinians amid Israel’s offensive.

A convoy of 31 trucks carrying food entered northern Gaza on Wednesday, the Israeli military office that oversees Palestinian civilian affairs said. The office, known by the acronym COGAT, said nearly 20 other trucks entered the north on Monday and Tuesday. Associated Press footage showed people carrying sacks of flour from the distribution site.

COGAT said Wednesday that Israel does not impose limits on the amount of aid entering. Israel has blamed U.N. agencies for the bottleneck, saying hundreds of trucks are waiting on the Palestinian side of Kerem Shalom for aid workers to collect them.

The Gaza Health Ministry said the death toll from Israel’s offensive had risen to 29,954 people, with 70,325 wounded. The ministry doesn’t differentiate between civilians and combatants, but it says two-thirds of the dead were children and women.

In its attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, Hamas and other Palestinian militants killed some 1,200 people, mainly civilians.