Shabaa Farms area, near nexus of Israel, Lebanon, and Syria. Wikipedia

As another shooting incident heated up Israel’s border with Lebanon on Monday, a Hezbollah-affiliated newspaper, al-Akhbar, has reported that the Shi’ite terror group has resolved to renew overt military operations against Israel.

According to initial reports, IDF soldiers from the Horev infantry battalion opened fire on what the Israeli 0404 news site referred to as “three suspicious figures” that had entered a “no-go” area adjacent to an army outpost at Har Dov, along the northern side of Mt. Hermon.

Troops reportedly opened fire in order to frighten off the intruders, when they spotted what they believed to be roadside explosive charges carried by the individuals. There was no report of injury to either side in the confrontation.

The trio fled back within Lebanese territory, and the army is searching the area, according to the report.

The incident comes in the wake of a series of hostile encounters between the IDF and Hezbollah in recent weeks.

Hezbollah chief, Hassan Nasrallah, said on October 14^th that an earlier attack that wounded two IDF soldiers in the same area was a “message” in retaliation for the killing of an operative of the group in September by the Israeli army.

Nasrallah claimed that the operative had been examining an Israeli spy device planted in Lebanon.

Hezbollah militants “detonated an explosive device on the Shebaa hills against a motorized Israeli patrol causing a number of injuries among the occupation’s soldiers,” Hezbollah said in a statement.

“Hezbollah is still strong and present, and has not weakened, despite the changes in the region and the media’s coverage of the global coalition… Israel wanted to test Hezbollah, and our response to that was the explosive device in Mount Dov,” Nasrallah said, according to The Times of Israel.

Hezbollah flags at a rally.

The IDF said, in response, that “In response to the activation of an explosive device in Har-Dov, which injured two IDF soldiers, the IDF responded with artillery towards two Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon. A second device was detonated later on.”

The army said that “the Lebanese government and Hezbollah are directly liable for this blatant breach of Israel’s sovereignty. The IDF responded to the unprovoked aggression “‹against its forces and will continue to operate in order to maintain the safety of”‹the northern border of Israel,” according to IDF Spokesman Lt. Col. Peter Lerner.

On August 10th, during Israel’s Operation Protective Edge against Hamas in Gaza, a senior Iranian military commander threatened that Hezbollah was prepared to open a second front of rocket fire against Israel as negotiators worked to bring quiet to the Jewish state’s southern border.

Hezbollah is prepared to “storm the Zionist regime by its high-precision missiles,” Lt. General Hossein Salami of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps’ said.

“Today, all the residents in the occupied territories feel insecure and the security of the occupied territories is in an equation that on one side the powerful Hezbollah exists which is ready to storm the occupied territories and everyone knows the destruction power and preciseness of its weapons…”