Israel: Buildings and vehicles damaged in Hezbollah attacks
Hezbollah peppered northern Israel with more than 100 rockets early this morning amid fears the conflict is edging closer to full-scale war after months of rising tensions.
Meanwhile Israeli President Isaac Herzog has admitted to a “sense of disappointment” at the way the new UK Government has acted towards his country.
The overnight rocket barrage triggered air raid sirens across northern Israel, forcing thousands of people to take refuge in shelters. The Israeli military reported that the rockets had been fired “towards civilian areas,” marking a potential escalation, as earlier attacks had mainly targeted military installations.
One rocket struck close to a residential building in Kiryat Bialik, near Haifa, injuring at least three people and igniting buildings and cars. Israel’s Magen David Adom emergency service confirmed that four people were wounded by shrapnel during the attack.
Avi Vazana hurried into a shelter with his wife and nine-month-old baby moments before hearing the explosion in Kiryat Bialik. He then ran outside, barefoot and shirtless, to check if anyone needed help, explaining: “I ran to the house when everything was still on fire to see if there were other people.”
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Hezbollah rockets detonating in northern Israel (Image: X)
Lebanon’s Health Ministry confirmed that one person was killed and another injured in an Israeli strike near the border.
The barrage followed an Israeli airstrike in Beirut on Friday that killed at least 45 people, including one of Hezbollah’s top leaders as well as women and children. Hezbollah was already reeling from a sophisticated attack days earlier that caused thousands of personal devices to explode.
The Israeli military said it carried out a wave of strikes across southern Lebanon in the past 24 hours, targeting about 400 militant sites, including rocket launchers. Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, an Israeli military spokesman, said these strikes had thwarted an even larger attack.
He said: “Hundreds of thousands of civilians have come under fire across northern Israel. They spent the night and now the morning in bomb shelters.
A view of damage at residential area in Kiryat Bialik, Israel (Image: Anadolu via Getty Images)
“Today, we saw fire that reached deeper into Israel than before.”
The military also reported intercepting multiple aerial devices launched from Iraq, following claims by Iran-backed militant groups that they had launched a drone attack on Israel.
Israel’s Health Ministry announced that hospitals in the north would begin moving operations into protected areas or shelters within medical facilities.
In a separate development, Israeli forces raided the West Bank offices of Al-Jazeera, which had been banned earlier this year over allegations of acting as a propaganda outlet for militant groups, claims the broadcaster denies.
Israel and Hezbollah have been exchanging fire since the war in Gaza began nearly a year ago, when Hezbollah started firing rockets in solidarity with Palestinians and Hamas, their fellow Iran-backed ally. The low-intensity conflict has claimed dozens of lives in Israel, hundreds in Lebanon, and displaced tens of thousands on both sides of the border.
Neither side appears eager for a full-blown war, and Hezbollah has thus far refrained from targeting Tel Aviv or major civilian infrastructure. However, in recent weeks, Israel has shifted its focus from Gaza to Lebanon, vowing to restore calm along the border so citizens can return to their homes. Hezbollah has said it will only cease its attacks if there is a ceasefire in Gaza, but peace talks led by the US, Egypt, and Qatar have repeatedly stalled.
The Gaza war began with Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, in which Palestinian militants killed about 1,200 people and took around 250 others hostage. They are still holding around 100 captives, of whom a third are believed to be dead. Gaza’s Health Ministry reports that more than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed, with women and children making up more than half of the casualties.
There are rising fears of all-out war (Image: Anadolu via Getty Images)
The families of hostages fear that a northern war could shift focus away from their plight and complicate negotiations for their release.
Israeli media reported that rockets fired from Lebanon early on Sunday were intercepted near Haifa and Nazareth, further south than previous rocket attacks. Schools were cancelled across northern Israel, adding to the growing sense of crisis.
Hezbollah claimed responsibility for launching dozens of Fadi 1 and Fadi 2 missiles – new weapons the group had not previously used – at the Ramat David airbase southeast of Haifa, “in response to repeated Israeli attacks on various Lebanese regions, which led to many civilian casualties.”
In July, the group released a video allegedly showing footage of the base captured by surveillance drones.
Hezbollah also claimed to have targeted facilities belonging to the Rafael defence firm, headquartered in Haifa, as retaliation for the wireless device explosions. However, it provided no evidence, and the Israeli military declined to comment on the statement.
Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate for a series of explosions that hit the pagers and walkie-talkies of Hezbollah members on Tuesday and Wednesday, killing at least 37 people, including two children, and wounding around 3,000. Israel has not confirmed or denied responsibility for the attacks.
On Friday, an Israeli airstrike brought down an eight-storey building in a densely populated neighbourhood of Beirut’s southern suburbs, where Hezbollah members were meeting in the basement. Among those killed was Ibrahim Akil, a top Hezbollah official who commanded the group’s special forces unit, known as the Radwan Force.
Lebanese authorities reported that seven women and three children were killed in Friday’s strike, with another 68 people wounded, 15 of whom required hospital treatment. At least 23 people remain missing, and the death toll may rise.
Israel’s President Isaac Herzog has said there is ‘disappointment’ at the UK Government (Image: AFP via Getty Images)
It was the deadliest airstrike on Beirut since the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war.
Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said the strike disrupted Hezbollah’s chain of command and took out Akil, whom he blamed for the deaths of Israelis. Akil had been on the US most-wanted list for years, with £5.7 million on offer as a result of the role he played in the 1983 bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut and the kidnapping of American and German hostages during Lebanon’s civil war in the 1980s.
Speaking on Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips on Sky News, Mr Herzog said: “We have outstanding relations with the British Government. We have outstanding relations with the people of Britain.
“I have, personally, very close affinity with His Majesty’s Government and with Britain at large, but we also have to understand that between friends we expect friends and allies to be there for us all the time, as we are for them.
“There is a sense of disappointment in Israel and I have expressed it to my friends.”
He added: “I met with Prime Minister Starmer at the opening of the Olympic Games. We expect that all our allies will be side-by-side with us in combating this terrible situation and fighting, like we are, to bring our hostages back home.”
