International
Rocket fire into the Lebanese border town of Arsal killed at least seven people and wounded 15 on Friday, Lebanon's state news agency said, in one of several such salvos to hit towns bordering war-torn Syria.
Security sources told Reuters that a field clinic and a Syrian refugee camp were both hit.
The National News Agency said a single rocket was responsible for the death toll in Arsal, an area in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley sympathetic to the mostly Sunni Muslim rebels fighting to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The area hosts tens of thousands of Syrian refugees who have fled violence.
Local security sources, however, said that at least seven rockets hit the area. The deaths came as at least 20 rockets and shells launched from Syria hit various border areas in the Bekaa Valley, including Arsal, according to the Lebanese army.
It was the first time that rockets landed inside the town center of Arsal. Rockets had been landing on the outskirts of town in recent months.
Lebanon, itself decimated by civil war from 1975 to 1990, has been struggling to keep itself out of the nearly three-year conflict raging in its much larger neighbor that has left more than 100,000 people killed since early 2011.
It was unclear if the town was specifically targeted or whether the rocket or rockets went astray, Al Jazeera's Zeina Khodr reported. The strike came as several battles raged between Syrian rebels and the Syrian regime along the border area.
Rockets also crashed into areas around the northern Lebanese border town of Hermel. One hit inside Hermel but caused no major damage; two more fell in neighboring villages, without reported casualties.
Hermel is supportive of Lebanon's powerful Shia Muslim armed movement Hezbollah, which has been fighting in Syria on the side of Assad, who is from the minority Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shia Islam.
A day earlier, Hermel, which is regularly the target of rocket and mortar attacks from Syrian rebels, suffered its first car bomb attack.
Responsibility for that attack, which killed four people including a suicide bomber inside the car, was claimed by the Lebanese branch of the Nusra Front, a Syrian rebel group affiliated with Al-Qaeda. It has not been possible to verify the claim.
The developments came as United Nations refugee chief Antonio Guterres said Friday it was vital that long-delayed Syria peace talks next week produce a "political solution" to the conflict.
He issued a fresh appeal for the world to help ease the massive burden on countries that have taken in millions of Syrian refugees since the start of the conflict.
"I am humble enough to recognize that there is no humanitarian solution for this problem. The solution is political," he told a meeting in Turkey of regional refugee-hosting nations.
"That's why it is very important to send a clear message to the international community gathering in Geneva next week that it is absolutely central to stop this bloodshed and to find a political solution."
Friday's meeting, in the Harran refugee camp on the border with Syria, brought together officials from Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon as well as Turkey to discuss humanitarian aid efforts for the massive tide of Syrians who have fled their homeland.
It comes five days before the Geneva II peace conference in Switzerland, aimed at finding an end to the 34-month conflict.
"What Syrian people need is peace and the possibility to go back to their country and to rebuild their country," Guterres said.
Al Jazeera and wire services
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