Hello and welcome to Newsar from the BBC World Service coming to you live from our

studios in Central London I'm Julian Marshall.

As Israel continues its military offensive against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and its

bombing campaign at the capital Beirut, UN peacekeepers in the South are increasingly being caught up in the conflict.

There are around 10,000 members of the UN's interim force in Lebanon or UNIFIL deployed

in the South, but in recent days there have been a number of incidents in which several members of the force have been injured as a result of Israeli fires seemingly directed at their positions.

Speaking to the BBC, a spokesperson for Unifel in Beirut,

Andrea Tenentes said the latest attacks appeared to be deliberate.

We have seen a lot in the last 12 months, exchanges of fire,

but this time it looks more of a deliberate attack against our troops.

When you fire at a cameras, when you fire at a camera

fire at illumination inside the base

and the tower closed inside the headquarters of the mission.

So it's very something that we are still trying to ask the Israeli authorities

for some explanation or what happened. Well Israel's previous city asked Unifil to pull back from the Lebanon-Israel border, but it's refused to do so.

And commenting on these recent incidents, the Israeli military has acknowledged that its forces

fired at what it called a threat near a UN peacekeeping mission

earlier today and that in the process its forces hit a unifilled post resulting in

the injury of two UN personnel and the statement continued

that the IDF took every precaution to minimize harm to civilians and peacekeepers alike.

We approached the idea for an interview but they said no one was

available at this time. Speaking in Beirut the Lebanese caretaker Prime Minister

...