Hizbullah fired rockets at Israel’s third largest city Haifa on Monday as Israeli forces looked poised to expand ground raids into south Lebanon on the first anniversary of the Gaza war, which has spread conflict across the Middle East.
Iran-backed Hizbullah, an ally of Hamas, the Palestinian militant group fighting Israel in Gaza, said it targeted a military base south of Haifa with missiles and launched another strike on Tiberias, 65km away.
Hizbullah also said it targeted areas north of Haifa with missiles later in the day. Israel’s military said about 135 projectiles had entered Israeli territory on Monday afternoon. Ten people were reported injured in the Haifa area and two others further south in central Israel.
Israel’s military said its air force was carrying out extensive bombings of Hizbullah targets in south Lebanon, and that two Israeli soldiers were killed in border-area combat, taking the military death toll inside Lebanon so far to 11.
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Lebanon’s health ministry said 10 firefighters were killed in an Israeli air strike on a municipal building in the border-area town of Bint Jbeil, and that other aerial attacks on Sunday killed 22 people in southern and eastern Lebanese towns.
The Israeli military has described its ground operation as “localised, limited and targeted” but it has steadily increased in scale since it began last week.
On Monday the military said soldiers from its 91st Division had moved into southern Lebanon after a year of operations in northern Israel, where Israeli forces have been engaged in cross-border fire with Hizbullah for the last year. Last week the military said regular armoured and infantry units had moved into Lebanon after commando units crossed the border a day earlier.
It has not said precisely where the troops are operating but it has said there were no plans to send them deep into Lebanon and that their aim was to clear border areas where Hizbullah fighters have been embedded.
Also on Monday the Israeli military said about 100 aircraft carried out a wave of strikes, hitting 120 targets in southern Lebanon within the space of an hour, including Radwan special forces units, Hizbullah’s missile force and its intelligence directorate.
The spiralling conflict has raised concerns that the United States, Israel’s superpower ally, and Iran will be sucked into a wider war in the Middle East. Iran launched a barrage of missiles at Israel on October 1st. Israel has said it will retaliate and is weighing its options. One possible target is Iran’s oil facilities.
A surface-to-air missile fired at central Israel from Yemen was also intercepted, the military said. The Iran-backed Houthi movement which controls northern Yemen has attacked Israel during the past year in what it says is solidarity with the Palestinians.
Hamas, which triggered the Gaza war with a surprise attack on Israel a year ago, meanwhile targeted Israel’s commercial capital Tel Aviv with a missile salvo, the group said, setting off sirens in central areas of the country. Israel stepped up air and ground attacks on Hamas in Gaza, killing at least 52 people, according to Palestinian medics.
Israeli air strikes have displaced 1.2 million people in Lebanon and as the bombing campaign intensifies many are afraid their country will face the vast scale of destruction wrought on Gaza by Israel’s air and ground onslaught there.
Israeli forces also issued a warning in Arabic to beachgoers and boat users to stay away from a swathe of the southern Lebanese coast, saying its navy would soon begin operations against Hizbullah from the sea.
Speaking at a cabinet meeting in Jerusalem marking the Gaza war anniversary, Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu said: “We are changing the security reality in our region, for our children’s sake, for our future, to ensure that what happened on October 7th does not happen again.”
Hizbullah began launching rockets at Israel on October 8th, 2023, in solidarity with Hamas. After a year of exchanges of fire between Hizbullah and Israel mostly limited to the frontier region, the conflict has significantly escalated in Lebanon.
Israelis marked the first anniversary of the Hamas attack with ceremonies and protests on Monday.
In their shock rampage through Israeli towns and kibbutz villages near the Gaza border a year ago, Hamas-led militants killed some 1,200 people and took about 250 hostages back to Gaza, according to Israeli figures.
The Hamas assault unleashed an Israeli offensive on Gaza that has largely flattened the densely populated enclave and killed almost 42,000 people, Palestinian health authorities say. – Reuters