Three United Nations peacekeepers suffered minor injuries on Sunday, the United Nations said. The explosion occurred near their vehicle near Lebanon’s southern border, where Hezbollah and Israeli shelling occurs almost daily.

The Iran-backed Hezbollah group has been engaged in cross-border firefights with the Israeli army in support of its ally Hamas since the Palestinian militant group’s attack on Israel on October 7 sparked the Gaza war.

“Today, three patrolling peacekeepers were slightly injured when an explosion occurred near their clearly marked UN vehicle near Yarine in southern Lebanon,” the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) said in a statement.

“All peacekeepers on the patrol have returned safely to their base. We are investigating the incident,” it said.

Earlier, Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency reported on Sunday that “enemy Israeli warplanes” had attacked the village of Dhayra, about one kilometer from Yarine, “resulting in injuries.”

A UNIFIL source told AFP that the explosion that injured the peacekeepers was likely the result of a nearby airstrike, but “was not a direct hit.”

In early August, Under-Secretary-General for Peace Operations Jean-Pierre Lacroix told AFP that UNIFIL was “more important than ever” in light of ongoing cross-border clashes, as it was “the only channel of communication between the Israeli and Lebanese sides, with all their components, such as Hezbollah.”

In April, a justice official told AFP that an ongoing investigation by the Lebanese army had found that three UN military observers and a translator had been injured by a landmine the previous month, while Israel blamed Hezbollah.

UNIFIL’s mandate, which expires at the end of the month, is to be extended by the UN Security Council for another year.

The Lebanese Health Ministry said on Sunday that one person was killed and another injured in an “Israeli airstrike” targeting a motorcycle in the town of Shebaa in southern Lebanon.

The Lebanese Resistance Brigades, a group close to Hezbollah, said one of its fighters had “died as a martyr while defending Lebanon and supporting the resistance in the Gaza Strip,” without specifying where.

Hezbollah later said it had fired Katyusha rockets at a military post in northern Israel in response to “the Israeli enemy’s attack and assassination in the city of Shebaa.”

According to an AFP count, 582 people were killed in the cross-border violence in Lebanon, most of them Hezbollah fighters, but including at least 128 civilians.

On the Israeli side, including in the annexed Golan Heights, 22 soldiers and 26 civilians were killed, according to army sources.