KFAR KILA, Lebanon, 7 October 2003 — Israeli troops in the disputed area of Shebaa in southern Lebanon shelled yesterday the hills of the village of Kfar Chouba, Lebanese police said.

According to police sources, shrapnel hit a civilian bus near Kfar Kila, at the Lebanese-Israeli border. There was no immediate word on injuries or damage, the sources said.

About five shells are believed to have fallen on the outskirts of Kfar Chouba, at the edge of the border with Israel. “There was no justification for the Israeli shelling on the Lebanese areas because no guerrilla activity were registered,” police sources said.

Meanwhile, Hezbollah resistance group described Israel’s attack on Syria on Sunday as a “serious violation which oversteps all the red lines and all the rules which have governed the conflict for nearly 30 years”. A Hezbollah statement warned that the move was “pushing the region toward the unknown”.

Israel said it had targeted a training camp for militants including Islamic Jihad, which claimed responsibility for a suicide bomb attack Saturday in Haifa, northern Israel which killed 19 people and wounded 50 others. Hezbollah said: “The attack against Syria is an attack against Lebanon”, and called on Arab governments to adopt a “very firm” stance against the air strike.

Several Israeli bullets also hit a house on the Lebanese side of the border in Kfar Kila, but no residents were harmed, the Lebanese security officials added on condition of anonymity.

The reported incident comes amid heightened tensions between Israel and Syria, Lebanon’s close ally, following Israel’s air raid Sunday on what the Jewish state said was a Palestinian militant base. There was no immediate comment from Israeli officials.

An official of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon, a peacekeeping force that regularly sends patrols along the border on the Lebanese side of the frontier, said there was a shooting incident and that it was investigating. It was unclear what prompted the shooting on a road that abuts the fence separating Lebanon from Israel.

A spokesman for Hezbollah also said he had heard reports of an incident but had no details. Shootings on the edge of this border town, some 100 kilometers southeast of Beirut, have been rare since Israeli troops withdrew from south Lebanon in 2000 following their 18-year occupation.

The area is generally calm, unlike the contested Shebaa Farms to the east were shootouts between Israeli border guards and Hezbollah fighters occasionally flare into artillery and rocket exchanges, sometimes prompting Israeli air strikes.

Lebanese security officials and soldiers who arrived at the scene after the shooting at sundown said Israeli soldiers patrolling a road on the Israeli side of the electrified border fence fired at two vehicles, a sedan and a passenger mini van.

One of the Lebanese vehicles fired on was pockmarked by bullets but apparently not seriously damaged, the security officials said. Israeli soldiers yelled at reporters and Lebanese soldiers who arrived at the scene about an hour after the shooting 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.

Meanwhile, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak yesterday warned Israel that it would find no partner to make peace with if it expels Palestinian President Yasser Arafat. “I hope that the Israeli threats are not serious,” Mubarak said in an interview with the official magazine of the armed forces for the 30th anniversary of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.

“If Israel expels or assassinates the main leaders of the Palestinian Authority, with whom can it negotiate?” Mubarak asked.

“Israel can obtain no political result and can achieve no objective by resorting to such illegal and immoral actions,” he warned, adding that such moves would only “lead to the spread of violence and despair.”