Israel and the militant Hezbollah group exchanged heavy gunfire across the Lebanese border on Sunday, raising fears of a wider conflict in the region as the months-long war in the Gaza Strip rages on.

“Dozens of rockets hit Israel, destroying homes, cars and communities,” Israel Defense Forces spokesman Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani said on X.

The Israeli rescue service Magen David Adom told X that three people were injured by shrapnel in the barrage.

In a later statement, the Israeli military said its warplanes had “attacked dozens of Hezbollah terror targets, including launch pads and military installations in dozens of areas in southern Lebanon.”

Hezbollah, meanwhile, said it fired dozens of rockets in its first response to Friday’s airstrike on a densely populated Beirut suburb that killed 45 people, including senior leaders of the group. The attack was followed by coordinated detonations of pagers and walkie-talkies by Hezbollah members across Lebanon.

Separately, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, a coalition of Iraqi militias backed by Iran, also said it fired drones at Israel on Sunday.

Israel and Hezbollah, which the United States designates as a terrorist organization, have been trading blows since the outbreak of war in Gaza, which began with the Hamas terrorist attacks on October 7. when Palestinian militants killed about 1,200 people and took about 250 others hostage. About 100 people are still in captivity, but a third are believed to be dead.

Since then, more than 41,000 people have died in the Israeli offensive in Gaza, according to health officials in the enclave. These figures do not distinguish between civilians and fighters.

Hezbollah said it began firing rockets in solidarity with the Palestinians and its fellow Iranian-backed ally Hamas. Since then, the low-intensity attacks have killed dozens of people in Israel, hundreds in Lebanon and forced tens of thousands to flee on both sides of the border.

In a separate development, Israeli soldiers closed Al Jazeera’s office in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank on Sunday morning.

“This is a blatant attack on the Al Jazeera channel and the Al Jazeera network, as well as on those who work with them, as well as on freedom of expression and the task of spreading the truth,” the network’s bureau chief, Walid Omari, told Reuters.

Israel banned Al Jazeera from broadcasting on Israeli territory, but the channel continued to broadcast from the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Last week, the Israeli government announced that it would withdraw press accreditation from Al Jazeera journalists in the country, four months after banning the channel from broadcasting in Israel.