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Key Points
- Israeli warplanes have carried out an intense bombardment of Lebanon and Hezbollah have fired rockets into Israel.
- The attacks came after an Israeli airstrike on Beirut killed 45 people, according to the Lebanese health ministry.
- The United Nations special coordinator in Lebanon says “no military solution” will make either side safer.
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.
“In recent days we have inflicted a series of blows on Hezbollah that it never imagined,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a video statement.
“If Hezbollah has not understood the message, I promise you, it will understand the message.”
Hundreds of thousands of people sought shelter from Hezbollah rockets fired from Lebanon into northern Israel on Sunday, Israel’s military said.
About 150 rockets, cruise missiles and drones were fired at Israel overnight and into Sunday, most of which were intercepted by air defences, including an “aerial target” that came from the east, 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 deaths. Residents had been instructed to stay near bomb shelters and safe rooms.
Israel closed schools and restricted gatherings in many northern areas of the country and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights early on Sunday.
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.
Iraqi coalition claims attacks on Israel
The attacks have stoked fears the conflicts in Lebanon, and Gaza — which Israeli forces have attacked for almost a year after the militant group Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel — could spiral into the rest of the region.
An official in the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, a grouping of Iran-backed armed factions, said they launched cruise missile and explosive drone attacks at Israel at dawn on Sunday as part of “a new phase in our support front” with Lebanon.
“Escalation in Lebanon means escalation from Iraq,” the official said.
The United Nations special coordinator in Lebanon, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, said in a post on X: “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.”
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
The attacks came 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 on Beirut 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.
That strike sharply escalated the conflict after .
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 84 people killed in Lebanon over the past week, the conflict toll in the country since October last year has surpassed 750.
Hezbollah has said it would keep fighting Israel until it agrees to a ceasefire with Hamas.
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 41,300 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.
On Sunday, Israeli President Isaac Herzog told Sky News in the UK that Israel did not want war with Lebanon but said the country had been “hijacked” by Hezbollah.