Lebanon’s Hezbollah fired more than 100 rockets toward Israel’s wider and deeper north early Sunday, some of which landed near the city of Haifa, as the two sides appeared to be moving toward all-out war after months of escalating tensions.
The rocket launch silenced air raid sirens in northern Israel overnight and prompted thousands of people to flee to shelters. The Israeli military said the rockets were fired “at civilian areas,” signaling a possible escalation after previous bombardments were aimed mostly at military targets.
Israel’s Magen David Adom rescue service said it treated four people for stab wounds, including a 76-year-old man who was in stable condition in Kiryat Bialik, a community near Haifa where buildings were destroyed and burned cars were wounded. It remains unclear whether the damage was caused by a missile or by an Israeli hijacker.
The crash followed an Israeli airstrike in Beirut on Friday that killed at least 37 people, including a top Hezbollah leader, as well as women and children. Hezbollah was already reeling from a sophisticated attack that detonated thousands of personal devices a few days ago.
The Israeli military said it had carried out a wave of strikes in southern Lebanon over the past 24 hours, targeting some 400 militant positions, including rocket launchers. Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, an Israeli military spokesman, said the strikes prevented a larger attack.
“Hundreds of thousands of civilians have been attacked across northern Israel. They spent the night and now the morning in bomb shelters,” he said. “Today we saw a fire that was deeper in Israel than before.”
Israel and Hezbollah have been at odds since the war in the Gaza Strip began nearly a year ago, when the militant group began firing rockets in solidarity with Palestinians and its Iran-backed ally Hamas. Low-level fighting has killed dozens of people in Israel, hundreds in Lebanon and displaced tens of thousands on both sides of the border.
Neither side is believed to be trying to fight. But in recent weeks, Israel has shifted its attention from Gaza to Lebanon, vowing to restore peace on the border so its citizens can return home. Hezbollah has said it will stop its attacks only if there is a ceasefire in Gaza, which appears increasingly difficult during lengthy talks led by the United States, Egypt and Qatar. have been flooded many times.
The Gaza war began with a Hamas attack on Oct. 7 in southern Israel, in which Palestinian militants killed about 1,200 people and took about 250 hostages. Hamas still holds about 100 prisoners, a third of whom have been killed. Gaza’s health ministry says more than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed. It doesn’t say how many fighters there are, but more than half of the dead are said to be women and children.
Israeli media reported that rockets fired from Lebanon were intercepted early Sunday in the Haifa and Nazareth areas, further south than most of the rockets launched so far. Israel cancelled schools across the north, deepening the sense of crisis.
Hezbollah said it had fired dozens of Fadi-1 and Fadi-2 missiles – a new type of weapon the group had never used before – at the Ramat Daoud airbase, southeast of Haifa, “in response to repeated Israeli attacks on several areas in Lebanon and caused the deaths of many civilian martyrs.”
In July, the group released a video it said was taken from the base by surveillance drones.
Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate against Israel for a series of explosions on Tuesday and Wednesday targeting Hezbollah members’ pagers and walkie-talkies that killed at least 37 people, including two children, and wounded some 3,000. Israel has been widely blamed for the attacks, which it has neither confirmed nor denied.
On Friday, an Israeli airstrike flattened an eight-story building in a densely populated neighborhood on the southern outskirts of Beirut as Hezbollah members were meeting in the basement, Israel said. Among the dead was Ibrahim Akil, a senior Hezbollah official who was commander of the group’s special unit, known as the Radwan Force.
Firas Abiad, Lebanon’s interim health minister, told reporters on Saturday that at least seven women and three children were killed in Friday’s airstrike on the building. He said 68 other people were injured, 15 of them hospitalized.
It was the deadliest attack in Beirut since a devastating month-long war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006, and the death toll could rise, with 23 missing, a government official said.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said the attack broke the group’s chain of command and eliminated Okil, who he said was responsible for the Israeli deaths.
Okil was paid $7 million for his role in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut and the U.S.-German hostage situation in Lebanon during the civil war of the 1980s.
Meltzer, Sewell and Mrow write for The Associated Press. Sewell and Mrow reported from Beirut.
