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Key Points
- Hezbollah fired rockets at Israel’s third-largest city, Haifa and other areas, including Tiberias.
- The rocket attacks resulted in 12 reported injuries in Israel: 10 in Haifa and two in central Israel.
- In Lebanon, an Israeli airstrike killed 10 firefighters, while other strikes killed 22 people.
Hezbollah has fired rockets at Israel’s third largest city, Haifa, as Israeli forces looked poised to expand a ground invasion into south Lebanon on the first anniversary of the Gaza war, which has spread conflict across the Middle East.
Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas, the Palestinian militant group fighting Israel in Gaza, said it targeted a military base south of Haifa on Monday with “Fadi 1” missiles and launched another strike on Tiberias, 65km away.
Hezbollah said it targeted areas north of Haifa with missiles later in the day. Israel’s military said around 135 projectiles had entered Israeli territory as of 5pm local time.
Ten people were reported injured in the Haifa area and two others further south in central Israel.
Israel’s military said the air force was carrying out extensive bombings of Hezbollah targets in south Lebanon, and that two Israeli soldiers were killed in border-area combat, taking the military death toll inside Lebanon so far to 11.
Lebanon’s health ministry said 10 firefighters were killed in an Israeli airstrike on a municipal building in the border area town of Bint Jbeil, and that other aerial attacks on Sunday killed 22 people in southern and eastern Lebanese towns.
In two weeks, Israel’s bombing campaign has killed more than 1,400 Lebanese people and left another 1.2 million without homes.
The Israeli military has described its ground invasion of Lebanon as “localised, limited and targeted”, but it has steadily increased in scale since it began last week.
On Monday, the military said soldiers from its 91st Division had moved into southern Lebanon after a year of operations in northern Israel, where Israeli forces have been engaged in cross-border fire with Hezbollah for the past year.
Last week, the military said regular armoured and infantry units had moved into Lebanon after commando units crossed the border a day earlier.
Also on Monday, around 100 Israeli fighters carried out a wave of strikes, hitting 120 targets in southern Lebanon within the space of an hour, including Radwan special forces units, Hezbollah’s missile force and its intelligence directorate.
“This operation follows a series of strikes aimed at degrading Hezbollah’s command, control, and firing capabilities, as well as assisting ground forces in achieving their operational goals,” the military said in a statement.
The spiralling conflict has raised concerns that the United States, Israel’s superpower ally, and Iran will be pulled into a wider war in the Middle East.
Iran launched a barrage of missiles at Israel on 1 October in response. Israel has said it will retaliate and is weighing its options. One possible target is Iran’s oil facilities.
An Israeli military statement said five rockets were launched towards Haifa, also a major Mediterranean port, from Lebanon and interceptors were fired at them.
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