Hezbollah launched more than 100 rockets early Sunday across a wider and deeper area of northern Israel, with some landing near the city of Haifa, as Israel launched hundreds of strikes on Lebanon. The sides appeared to be spiralling toward all-out war following months of escalating tensions.
The rocket barrage overnight set off air raid sirens across northern Israel, sending thousands of people scrambling into shelters. The Israeli military said rockets had been fired “toward civilian areas,” pointing to a possible escalation after previous barrages had mainly been aimed at military targets.
One rocket struck near a residential building in Kiryat Bialik, a community near Haifa, wounding at least three people and setting buildings and cars on fire. Israel’s Magen David Adom rescue service said a total of four people were wounded by shrapnel in the barrage.
Avi Vazana raced to a shelter with his wife and nine-month-old baby before he heard the boom of the rocket hitting in Kiryat Bialik. Then he went back outside to see if anyone was hurt.
“I ran without shoes, without a shirt, only with pants. I ran to this house when everything was still on fire to try to find if there are other people,” he said.
Lebanon’s Health Ministry said that three people were killed and another four wounded in Israeli strikes near the border, without saying whether they were civilians or combatants.
The barrage came after an Israeli airstrike in Beirut on Friday killed at least 45 people, including top Hezbollah leader Ibrahim Akil, as well as women and children. Hezbollah was already reeling from a sophisticated attack that caused thousands of personal devices to explode just days earlier.
Israel says it hit hundreds of militant sites
The Israeli military said it carried out a wave of strikes across southern Lebanon over the past 24 hours, hitting some 400 militant sites, including rocket launchers. Lt.-Col. Nadav Shoshani, an Israeli military spokesperson, said those strikes had thwarted an even larger attack.
“Hundreds of thousands of civilians have come under fire across a lot of northern Israel. They spent the night and now the morning in bomb shelters,” he said. “Today we saw fire that was deeper into Israel than before.”
The military also said it had intercepted multiple aerial devices fired from the direction of Iraq, after Iran-backed militant groups there claimed to have launched a drone attack on Israel.
Israel’s Health Ministry said all hospitals in the north would begin moving operations to protected areas or shelters within the medical centres.
In a separate development, Israeli forces raided the West Bank bureau of Al-Jazeera, which it had banned earlier this year, accusing it of serving as a mouthpiece for militant groups, allegations denied by the pan-Arab broadcaster.
Israel and Hezbollah have traded fire since the outbreak of the war in Gaza nearly a year ago, when the militant group began firing rockets in solidarity with the Palestinians and its fellow Iran-backed ally Hamas. The low-level fighting has killed dozens of people in Israel, hundreds in Lebanon, and displaced tens of thousands on both sides of the frontier.
The war in Gaza began with Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack into Israel, in which Palestinian militants killed some 1,200 people and took around 250 hostage, according to Israeli tallies. They are still holding around 100 captives, a third of whom are believed to be dead. Gaza’s Health Ministry says over 41,000 Palestinians have been killed. It does not say how many were fighters but says women and children make up over half of the dead.
Families of the hostages have raised fears that a war in the north would distract from their plight and further complicate the negotiations over their release.
Hezbollah seeking retaliation for explosive attacks
Israeli media reported that rockets fired from Lebanon early Sunday were intercepted in the areas of Haifa and Nazareth, which are farther south than most of the rocket fire to date. Israel cancelled school across the north, deepening the sense of crisis.
Hezbollah said it had launched dozens of Fadi 1 and Fadi 2 missiles — a new type of weapon the group had not used before — at the Ramat David airbase, southeast of Haifa, “in response to the repeated Israeli attacks that targeted various Lebanese regions and led to the fall of many civilian martyrs.”
The Israeli military says it has killed senior Hezbollah commander Ibrahim Akil, along with 10 other militant commanders in a missile strike in Beirut. The attack came just days after waves of exploding pagers and walkie-talkies killed dozens and wounded thousands in Lebanon.
In July, the group released a video with what it said was footage it had filmed of the base with surveillance drones.
Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate against Israel for a wave of explosions that hit pagers and walkie-talkies belonging to Hezbollah members on Tuesday and Wednesday, killing at least 37 people — including two children — and wounding around 3,000. The attacks were widely blamed on Israel, which has not confirmed or denied responsibility.
On Friday, an Israeli airstrike took down an eight-storey building in a densely populated neighbourhood in Beirut’s southern suburbs as Hezbollah members were meeting in the basement, according to Israel.
Lebanon’s health minister, Firass Abiad, told reporters Saturday that at least seven women and three children were killed in Friday’s airstrike on the building. He said that another 68 people were wounded, including 15 who were hospitalized. It was the deadliest strike on Beirut since the bruising month-long war in 2006 between Israel and Hezbollah.
Sajjan Gohel, the international security director at the Asia-Pacific Foundation, discusses Hezbollah’s role in Lebanon and its influence on the country’s Shia population amid escalating tensions with Israel.
Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said the attack broke up the group’s chain of command while taking out Akil, who he said was responsible for Israeli deaths.
Akil had been on the U.S. most wanted list for years, with a $7-million US reward, over his alleged role in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut and the taking of American and German hostages in Lebanon during the civil war in the 1980s.