Tensions Subside in South Lebanon but Rise Again in West Bank and Israel

After a rare outbreak of violence along the Israel-Lebanon border, the situation across the region remained volatile on Friday, when two Israelis were killed in a drive-by shooting in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and at least one other civilian was killed during a car-ramming in Tel Aviv.

But fears of a wider escalation on multiple fronts involving Israel, Lebanon and Palestinians in Gaza subsided, at least for the moment. Palestinian militias stopped firing rockets toward Israel, tensions cooled at a sensitive Jerusalem holy site, and the Israeli military ended its counterattacks on Lebanon and Gaza.

The shootings in Israel and the West Bank capped an alarming sequence of violence across the region this week, with interconnected escalations in Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and southern Lebanon.

An Israeli police raid on Wednesday in Jerusalem on the Aqsa mosque compound, a sensitive holy site known to Jews as Temple Mount, outraged Palestinians marking the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. That prompted militias in Lebanon — led by Hamas, according to the Israeli military — to fire an unusually large barrage of 34 rockets at Israel on Thursday, at least two of which landed in built-up areas.

The gravity of that salvo — as Jews celebrated the Passover holiday — led Israel to strike back at the militias in southern Lebanon early on Friday, as well as at Hamas military sites in the Gaza Strip.

Experts said the confrontation along Israel’s northern border was the gravest involving Israel and Lebanon-based militias in 17 years, and it left the region braced for the possibility of a longer battle across multiple arenas.

But by Friday afternoon, those fears had ebbed, at least temporarily, as all sides signaled they were not seeking an immediate escalation.

Both Israel and the militias avoided causing the kind of damage that could lead to all-out war. Palestinian groups in Gaza fired short-range rockets instead of targeting major cities in central Israel, while Israel also kept its strikes away from Gazan city centers. No injuries were reported on either side, though a hospital on the edge of Gaza City said it had suffered collateral damage after a nearby Israeli strike.

Friday prayers that drew tens of thousands of worshipers to the Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem also passed without incident.

In Israel and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, however, two new attacks stirred tensions.

Late Friday, at least one person was killed during a car-ramming incident in Tel Aviv, in what the police described as a terrorist attack. An Israeli ambulance service said that five other people were injured, all “tourists,” but it did not specify their nationalities.

Earlier, two Israeli sisters, both also British passport holders, were shot and killed and a third woman was critically injured as they drove through the Jordan Valley, the easternmost part of the West Bank. The Israeli government said that it was treating the shooting as a terrorist attack, suggesting that it believed the perpetrators were Palestinians.

Hamas praised both attacks and said they were a response to Israel’s mosque raid in Jerusalem earlier this week and also to the Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon and Gaza. But it stopped short of taking responsibility.

After the car-ramming attack, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said he had instructed the police and army to mobilize additional forces, according to Reuters.

Hamas, the dominant Palestinian militia in Gaza, also warned of further reprisals against Israel if there were more police raids at the Aqsa mosque compound. And the Israeli military called up reservists, including those from the air force and air defense services, as a precaution against further attacks.

The violence further complicated an already volatile security situation in the region. It came at a time of rising tensions in Jerusalem, unusually high violence in the occupied West Bank and divisions within Israel’s military and broader society over the government’s contentious plan to overhaul the judiciary.

Within Israel, the range of threats to its security led to criticism from the political opposition about the extent to which the internal political divisions had made the country more vulnerable to attack.

The judicial plan has generated widespread anger among military reservists, thousands of whom refused last month to report for volunteer duty in protest. When Yoav Gallant, the defense minister, publicly warned that this disquiet had endangered national security, Mr. Netanyahu fired him for insubordination.

But Mr. Netanyahu never formally sent Mr. Gallant a letter of dismissal, meaning that Mr. Gallant remains in limbo, as does the military he technically still oversees. That uncertainty has prompted concerns that Israel appears weak to its opponents, and created rare flashes of disunity between the government and the opposition in the face of an external threat.

“This is yet another reminder that in the Middle East, you don’t turn security into politics,” Benny Gantz, an opposition lawmaker and former defense minister, said in a statement on Friday. ”Israel cannot afford a defense minister on parole amid the challenges at hand.”

In an apparent attempt to dispel that impression, Mr. Netanyahu appeared in public on Friday with Mr. Gallant, stressing Israel’s strength and unity. “Our enemies are putting us to the test again, and once again they will discover, even in this test, that we stand together,” he said.

But Israel’s enemies have appeared unconvinced.

Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, an Iran-backed Lebanese militia that dominates southern Lebanon and fought a war with Israel in 2006, recently said that he believed Israel was on the verge of collapse, referring to the domestic political crisis over the proposed judicial overhaul that has exacerbated longstanding divisions within Israeli society.

“As we have always predicted, great Israel has fallen,” Mr. Nasrallah said in a speech last month. “There is no trust in the army, political leaders or military leaders,” he added.

Israeli military officials say that Hezbollah has appeared increasingly emboldened in recent weeks. In an unusually brazen operation last month, a man who officials said was likely linked to Hezbollah crossed illegally from Lebanon to Israel and planted a bomb beside an Israeli highway. The attack severely injured an Israeli citizen.

Israel has a long history of conflict with Lebanese groups, and occupied southern Lebanon between 1982 and 2000 to prevent earlier generations of armed Palestinians from using it as a launchpad for attacks on Israel. Israel briefly invaded again during the 2006 war, leaving parts of the country in ruins. But since 2006, tensions have simmered but rarely boiled over.

The immediate trigger for this week’s confrontations was early on Wednesday morning, when the Israeli police raided the Aqsa mosque compound, where Palestinians had barricaded themselves inside a prayer hall. Officers arrested more than 350 Palestinians. Video circulated on social media showed the police using batons to beat people inside the prayer hall, and Palestinians setting off fireworks at the police as they forced their way in.

The Israeli police said it was a legitimate act of law enforcement — to detain troublemakers who had stockpiled stones and fireworks and planned to ambush Jewish visitors expected to enter the site later in the day, as part of a Passover pilgrimage. While the site has been a mosque for more than a millennium, it was also the location of two Jewish temples in antiquity that were at the center of Jewish practice.

But to Palestinians, the raid was an unjustifiable assault on Muslim worshipers during the holiest month in Islam. The raid caused fury across the Middle East — and on Thursday, it appeared to prompt the rare rocket barrage from Lebanon.

Militias based in southern Lebanon fired more than 30 rockets across Israel’s northern border, causing damage to property but no deaths. The Israeli military attributed the rocket fire to branches of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, two militias based in Gaza that also have a presence in Lebanon. Both of those groups had condemned the raid at the holy site.

The military said it believed that the groups had acted with the knowledge of Hezbollah, which has significant influence in southern Lebanon, where it is considered more powerful than the Lebanese Army.

Israeli warplanes retaliated before 1 a.m. on Friday with strikes on several sites in Gaza, most of them connected to Hamas’s military wing. Roughly four hours later, Israeli planes struck what the military said were three sites controlled by Hamas in southern Lebanon, close to where the rocket barrage had originated on Thursday afternoon.

Experts said it was the most serious escalation along the Israel-Lebanon border since the 2006 war.

The Israeli response did not prompt more rocket fire from Lebanon, but it did lead armed groups in Gaza to launch 44 short-range rockets toward Israel, according to the Israeli military.

Most were intercepted by Israeli air defense systems or landed in open areas, and only one hit a building.

Hiba Yazbek contributed reporting from Nazareth, Israel.