Israel, Hezbollah step up strikes as war threat looms

BEIRUT

Lebanon’s Hezbollah launched over 100 rockets on Sunday across a wider and deeper area of northern Israel, with some landing near the city of Haifa.

The rocket barrage overnight sent thousands of people scrambling into shelters. The rocket fire reached Kiryat Bialik on the edge of Haifa, a major city in northern Israel, where it left a building in flames, another pockmarked with shrapnel, and vehicles incinerated.

Israel's civil defense agency ordered all schools in the country's north closed following the rocket fire.

Hezbollah announced that it targeted Israeli military production facilities and an air base in the Haifa area after the communication device blasts last week that killed 39 and wounded almost 3,000.

"In an initial response" to the explosions of the pagers and two-way radios, which it blamed on Israel, Hezbollah "bombed the Rafael military industry complexes" in northern Israel with "dozens" of rockets, the group said.

It said it targeted Ramat David airbase with Fadi-1 and Fadi-2 rockets. The site is among the deepest inside Israeli territory so far targeted, and this appeared to be the group's first use of that rocket type during the Gaza war.

In a statement yesterday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel has “landed a series of blows on Hezbollah that it could have never imagined.”

“If Hezbollah did not get the message, I assure you it will get the message.”

“No country can tolerate attacks on its citizens, attacks on its cities. And we, the State of Israel, will not tolerate it either," he said, vowing to return residents of northern Israel displaced by nearly a year of fighting to their homes.

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant also said that Hezbollah is “beginning to feel some of our capabilities,” vowing that Israel will continue to operate against the group.

An Israeli air strike on Sept. 20 killed the head of Hezbollah's elite unit Ibrahim Aqil, whose funeral in Beirut yesterday drew large crowds.

The death toll from the Sept. 20 attack on a densely populated Hezbollah stronghold in south Beirut rose again yesterday and has reached 45.

"With the region on the brink of an imminent catastrophe, it cannot be overstated enough: There is NO military solution that will make either side safer," United Nations special coordinator for Lebanon Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert said on social media platform X.

Meanwhile, civil defense rescuers in Gaza City said an Israeli strike yesterday on a school-turned-shelter killed at least seven people, with the Israeli military saying it targeted Hamas militants.

Civil defense agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal reported "seven martyrs and a number of wounded, including serious cases, as a result of Israeli shelling of Kafr Qasim School" in the Al-Shati refugee camp. He said hundreds of displaced Gazans were sheltering there.

The Israeli military said it was targeting Palestinian militants operating from the school grounds, and that its forces had taken steps "to mitigate the risk of harm to uninvolved civilians" including by using "precise munitions" and surveillance.