Over 30,000 crossed into Syria from Lebanon

Well over 30,000 people, mainly Syrians, have crossed into Syria from Lebanon in the past 72 hours, the UN refugee agency said yesterday, amid an escalating conflict between Israeli forces and Hezbollah that has killed hundreds of people in Lebanon.
About 80 percent of those crossings are Syrians and about 20 percent are Lebanese, said the UNHCR representative in Syria, Gonzalo Vargas Llosa, adding that about half are children and adolescents, and that men are making the crossing in smaller numbers than women.
“They are crossing from a country at war to one that has faced a crisis conflict for 13 years,” an extremely difficult choice, he told a news conference.
“We will have to see over the next few days how many more do so,” added the representative.
Meanwhile, an Israeli air strike yesterday killed five Syrian soldiers near the border with Lebanon, the official news agency SANA reported, citing a military source.
“The Israeli enemy carried out an aerial attack… on one of our military positions near Kfar Yabus on the Syrian-Lebanese border,” SANA quoted the source as saying, adding that five Syrian soldiers were killed and one was wounded.
The raid came a day after the Israeli army said its warplanes struck “infrastructure along the Syria-Lebanon border used by Hezbollah to transfer weapons from Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon”. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor said Israeli warplanes targeted a crossing that links Syria’s Qusayr area to Lebanon, causing “a number of wounded”, reports AFP.