Israel and Hezbollah have exchanged heavy fire, with Israeli warplanes carrying out the most intense bombardment in almost a year of war across Lebanon’s south and Hezbollah firing rockets deep into northern Israel.
The Israeli military said it struck around 290 targets on Saturday (local time), including thousands of Hezbollah rocket launcher barrels, and said it would continue to strike targets of the Iran-backed movement.
Israel closed schools and restricted gatherings in many northern areas of the country and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights early on Sunday.
Sirens sounded all night as multiple rockets and missiles were fired from Lebanon and Iraq, most of which were intercepted by Israeli aerial defence systems, the military said.
Several buildings were struck, including a house badly damaged near the Israeli city of Haifa.
Rescue teams treated wounded but there were no reports of fatalities as residents had been instructed to stay near bomb shelters and safe rooms.
Israeli security forces examine a site hit by a rocket fired from Lebanon, in Kiryat Bialik, northern Israel, on Sunday. Source: AAP / Ariel Schalit/AP
Hezbollah said it targeted the Israeli Ramat David Airbase with dozens of missiles in response to “repeated Israeli attacks on Lebanon”, the group posted on its Telegram channel on Sunday.
The successive barrages of rocket attacks launched by Hezbollah at Ramat David are the deepest strikes it has claimed since hostilities began.
Iran-backed Iraqi militants in a statement also claimed an explosive drone attack on Israel on Sunday.
The escalating attacks come less than 48 hours after an Israeli airstrike targeting Hezbollah commanders in a suburb of the Lebanese capital, Beirut.
The death toll from that strike rose to 45, the Lebanese health ministry said on Sunday. It marked the deadliest Israeli airstrike on Beirut since the summer 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war.
Hezbollah, a powerful Iran-backed group, said 16 members including senior leader Ibrahim Aqil and another commander, Ahmed Wahbi, were among those killed on Friday in the deadliest strike in nearly a year of conflict with Israel.
Israel’s army said it hit an underground gathering of Aqil and leaders of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan forces, and had almost completely dismantled its military chain of command.
The attack levelled a multi-storey residential building in the crowded suburb and damaged a nursery next door, a security source said.
Three children were among those killed, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.
Friday’s strike sharply escalated the conflict and inflicted another blow on Hezbollah after two days of attacks in which pagers and walkie-talkies used by its members exploded.
The death toll in those attacks, widely believed to have been carried out by Israel, has risen to 39 with more than 3,000 injured.
Israel has neither confirmed nor denied involvement.
With at least 70 people killed in Lebanon over the past week, the conflict toll in the country since October last year has surpassed 740.
Hezbollah has said it would keep fighting Israel until it agrees to a ceasefire in its war against Hamas in the Palestinian enclave of Gaza, triggered by a Hamas-led rampage in southern Israel on 7 October.
Hamas-led militants killed some 1,200 people during the group’s October 7 attack on Israel, taking around 250 hostages.
The Israeli military’s retaliatory assault on Gaza has killed more than 41,000 people, according to the enclave’s health ministry.
United States officials say a ceasefire agreement is unlikely anytime soon.
Israel wants Hezbollah to cease fire and withdraw forces from the border region, adhering to a United Nations resolution signed with Israel in 2006, irrespective of any Gaza deal.
