Nahariya: Hezbollah launched more than 100 rockets early Sunday across northern Israel, with some landing near the city of Haifa, as Israel launched hundreds of strikes on Lebanon. A Hezbollah leader declared an “open-ended battle” was underway as both sides appeared to be spiralling closer toward all-out war.
The overnight rocket barrage was in response to Israeli attacks in Lebanon that have killed dozens, including a veteran Hezbollah commander, and an unprecedented attack targeting the group’s communications devices. Air raid sirens across northern Israel sent hundreds of thousands of people scrambling into shelters.
Hezbollah’s deputy leader Naim Kassem said the rocket attack was just the beginning of what’s now an “open-ended battle” with Israel. “We admit that we are pained. We are humans. But as we are pained — you will also be pained,” Kassem said at the funeral of top Hezbollah commander Ibrahim Akil.
One rocket struck near a residential building in Kiryat Bialik, a city near Haifa, wounding at least three people and setting buildings and cars ablaze. Israel’s Magen David Adom rescue service said four people were wounded by shrapnel in the barrage.
Avi Vazana raced to a shelter with his wife and 9-month-old baby before he heard the rocket hitting in Kiryat Bialik. Then he went back outside to see if anyone was hurt.
“I ran without shoes, without a shirt, only with pants. I ran to this house when everything was still on fire to try to find if there are other people,” he said. Lebanon’s Health Ministry said that three people were killed and another four wounded in Israeli strikes near the border, without saying whether they were civilians or combatants. The rocket barrage came after an Israeli airstrike on Friday in Beirut killed at least 45 people, including Akil, one of Hezbollah’s top leaders, several other fighters, and women and children. Hezbollah was already reeling from a sophisticated attack that caused thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies to explode just days earlier.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel would take whatever action was necessary to restore security in the north and allow people to return to their homes.
“No country can accept the wanton rocketing of its cities. We can’t accept it either,” he said. In the United States, White House national security spokesman John Kirby remained hopeful for a peaceful resolution, telling “Fox News Sunday” the US has been “involved in extensive and quite assertive diplomacy”. “We are watching all these escalating tensions that have been occurring over the last week or so, with great concern, and we want to make sure that we can continue to do everything we can to try to prevent this from becoming an all-out war there with Hezbollah across that Lebanese border,” he said.
The Israeli military said it struck about 400 militant sites, including rocket launchers, across southern Lebanon in the past 24 hours, thwarting an even larger attack.
“Hundreds of thousands of civilians have come under fire across a lot of northern Israel,” said Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, an Israeli military spokesman. “Today we saw fire that was deeper into Israel than before.”
The military also said it had intercepted multiple aerial devices fired from the direction of Iraq, after the groups there claimed to have launched a drone attack on Israel.