Hezbollah counterattacks: Launches more than 100 rockets in a large area of ​​Israel

NAHARIYA, Israel (AP).— Hezbollah launched more than 100 rockets yesterday morning over an area of ​​Israel that was wider and farther from the border than in previous attacks. Some shells landed near the northern city of Haifa, while Israel carried out hundreds of strikes in Lebanon.

The two sides appeared headed for open war after months of rising tensions.

The round of rockets set off air raid sirens in northern Israel before dawn and sent thousands running to shelters. The Israeli military said rockets had been fired “into civilian areas,” pointing to a possible escalation after previous attacks mainly targeted military targets.

A rocket landed near a residential building in Kiryat Bialik, a town near Haifa, injuring at least three people and setting buildings and cars on fire.

The Magen David Adom rescue service said it treated four people for shrapnel wounds.

Avi Vazana ran to a shelter with his wife and 9-month-old baby before hearing the roar of the rocket that hit Kiryat Bialik. He then went out to see if anyone was injured.

“I ran without shoes, without a shirt, only with pants. “I ran to this house when everything was still on fire to look if there were other people,” he said.

The Lebanese Health Ministry said one person had been killed and another wounded in an Israeli attack near the border.

The attack followed an Israeli bombing in Beirut that killed at least 45 people, including one of the leaders of the Lebanese political and military group, as well as women and children. The group had already suffered a blow from a sophisticated attack that used thousands of personal explosive devices a few days earlier.

Israel’s stance

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel will take all necessary measures to restore calm and allow residents to return to their homes in the north.

“No country would accept rockets falling on its cities, and we are not going to accept it either,” said the president.

Israeli military chief Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi told reporters that the army is ready to increase pressure on Hezbollah in the coming days. “We have many other capabilities that we have not applied yet,” he declared.

For his part, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant praised the recent attacks against Hezbollah.

On Sunday night after visiting the Israeli army’s Northern Command headquarters, Gallant called the attacks “significant, important and powerful.”

Israel, he noted, will take all necessary measures to ensure “the safe return of northern communities to their homes.”

“This last week has been the most difficult in Hezbollah’s history, especially this last day,” he added.

Other funerals were held in Lebanon. Seven people, including three women and two minors, were buried in the village of Mays al-Jabal in southern Lebanon, where Lebanese Christian lawmaker Melhem Khalaf said Israel “uses the laws of the jungle instead of international conventions, especially those that call for the protection of civilians.”

In the United States, the spokesman for the White House National Security Council, John Kirby, insisted that, despite everything, there is hope for a peaceful solution.

The United States “remains involved in quite extensive and active diplomacy,” Kirby said on “Fox News Sunday.”

“We have been watching with great dismay these tensions that have been increasing over the last week, and we want to make sure that we are doing everything we can to prevent this from turning into an open war with Hezbollah,” he said.

War in “new phase”

Hezbollah lawmaker Hasan Fadlala, at the funeral of a member of the group on Sunday, said the war had entered “a new phase” and that the group will continue its attacks until there is a ceasefire in Gaza.

“We have a strong and capable resistance,” he said. “All options are on the table, and it is prepared for any eventuality, any war, any confrontation.”

Hezbollah’s number two in command, Naim Kassem, said Sunday that the group is now in an open-ended war against Israel, and threatened to displace more people in northern Israel.

“We admit that we are hurting. We are human beings. But just as we are grieving, you will be too,” Kassem said at the funeral of Hezbollah commander Ibrahim Akil.

“Your economy will be destroyed… and you will not meet your goal,” he added.

Kassem assured that Hezbollah, which has lost several leaders in recent months, “has re-emerged stronger, and that will be evident on the front lines.”

He said the barrage of more than 100 rockets fired at Israel early Sunday morning was just the beginning.

The Israeli military said it had struck 400 militant targets in southern Lebanon in the past 24 hours, including rocket launchers. Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, an Israeli army spokesman, said those bombings had thwarted an even larger attack.

“Hundreds of thousands of civilians have come under attack across northern Israel. “They spent the night and now the morning in bomb shelters,” he said. “Today we saw a fire that went deeper into Israel than before.”

The military also said it had intercepted several aerial devices launched from the direction of Iraq, after Iranian-backed groups said they launched a drone attack against Israel.

The Israeli military said all hospitals in the north would begin moving their operations to protected areas or shelters within medical centers.

On the other hand, Israeli forces raided the West Bank office of Al Jazeera early Sunday morning, which had already been banned in Israel this year accused of serving as a mouthpiece for armed groups. The pan-Arab television station has rejected the accusations.

Israel and Hezbollah have exchanged fire since the war in Gaza began almost a year ago, when the armed group began launching rockets in solidarity with the Palestinians and Hamas, which like the Lebanese group receives Iranian support. Low-level fighting has left dozens dead in Israel, hundreds in Lebanon and displaced tens of thousands of people on both sides of the border.

Until recently, it was believed that neither side was seeking war and Hezbollah has so far avoided attacking Tel Aviv or any major civilian infrastructure. But in recent weeks, Israel has turned its attention from Gaza to Lebanon and promised to bring calm to the border so its citizens can return to their homes. Hezbollah has said it will only stop its attacks if there is a ceasefire in Gaza, something that looks increasingly unlikely as protracted negotiations led by the United States, Egypt and Qatar have successively stalled.

The war in Gaza began with the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, in which Palestinian militants killed about 1,200 people and took about 250 hostages. They are still holding about 100 people, a third of whom are believed to have died. The Gaza Health Ministry says some 41,000 Palestinians have died, and although it does not detail how many were combatants, it notes that half of the dead were women and children.

Relatives of Israeli hostages have expressed fear that the war in the north will distract from the plight of the captives and complicate negotiations over their release.

The United Nations envoy asked all parties to withdraw.

“With the region on the brink of imminent catastrophe, it cannot be repeated enough: there is NO military solution that will make either side safer,” said Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert in a post on X.

Meanwhile, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip expressed fears that they will be forgotten as the world’s attention is now focused on Israel’s northern border.

“All the press is focused on Lebanon, they have forgotten about Gaza,” Nezar Zaqout, who lives in a tent camp in Muwasi, in the Gaza Strip, told The Associated Press. “Every day we heard that there was hope for negotiations, or we saw on the news that they were trying to solve the problem of the displaced… but they have totally forgotten about us.”

Saadi Abu Mustafa said he was hopeful for a ceasefire mediated by Qatar, Egypt and the United States, but fears that increased violence on the border with Lebanon “will negatively affect us.”

“They forget about Gaza, no negotiations, no prisoner exchange, no ceasefire,” Mustafa complained.

Separately, relatives of Israeli hostages held by Hamas also expressed fears that the situation in Lebanon would distract from their own misfortune.

“I am extremely dismayed by the rising tensions with Hezbollah because my worst fear is that public attention, world attention” will be distracted, said Udi Goren, a relative of Tal Haimi, an Israeli man killed in the Oct. 7 attack and whose body was taken to Gaza.

Israeli media said rockets launched from Lebanon on Sunday were intercepted in the areas of Haifa and Nazareth, further south than the areas hit by rocket fire so far. Israel canceled classes across the north, compounding the sense of crisis.

Hezbollah said it had launched dozens of Fadi 1 and Fadi 2 missiles, a new class of weapon that the group had not used before, at the Ramat David air base, southeast of Haifa, “in response to repeated Israeli strikes that hit several Lebanese regions and led to the fall of many civilian martyrs.”