BEIRUT (AFP) — The Lebanese army and UN peackeepers found on Friday a weapons cache in southern Lebanon near the border with Israel, a day after rockets were fired on the Jewish state.
A rocket launcher and several rockets were found in an area near the deployment of UN peacekeepers in southern Lebanon, the army said in a statement.
The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon issued a similar statement saying that a UNIFIL patrol "operating in coordination with the Lebanese Armed Forces found an old weapons cache inside two disused bunkers."
The cache contained "approximately 34 Grad-P rockets and some boxes of allied ammunition" and was found in bunkers covered by camouflage nets near the villages of Kfar Shuba and Kfar Hammam close to the border with Israel.
"There is no sign of any recent use of the bunkers and the weapons appear to date from the period of the 2006 conflict," UNIFIL said in a statement in reference to Israel's 34-day on Lebanon's militant Hezbollah.
UNFIL commander Major General Claudio Graziano said the weapons would be handed over to the Lebanese army for their disposal.
The weapons find came a day after three rockets fired from Lebanon slammed into an area around the northern Israeli town of Nahariya, lightly wounding two people, amid heightened fears of a second front opening up in the Gaza war.
Hezbollah has denied it fired the salvo while officials in both Israel and Lebanon said it was probably the work of a radical Palestinian faction.
Israel launched a deadly onslaught on the Gaza Strip on December 27 to stop rocket attacks from the enclaved territory.
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