Hezbollah launched some 215 rockets and several more missiles and drones at northern Israel on Wednesday, in what it said was a response to the killing of a senior commander in the terror group by an Israeli airstrike a night earlier.
The barrages marked the largest attack carried out by Hezbollah during ongoing fighting on the Lebanon border amid the war in the Gaza Strip.
And the terror group vowed to ramp up its attacks in retaliation for Israel’s elimination of top commander Taleb Abdullah. At a funeral procession in Beirut, senior Hezbollah official Hashem Safieddine said the group would increase the intensity, force and quantity of its operations against Israel.
“If the enemy is screaming and moaning about what happened to it in northern Palestine, let him prepare himself to cry and wail,” Safieddine said.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a security assessment Wednesday evening “in light of the developments in the north,” his office said.
The successive Hezbollah attacks began on Wednesday morning with a barrage of at least 90 rockets fired at several areas in northern Israel, including Tiberias — for the first time amid the war — Safed and Rosh Pina, sending tens of thousands of people to shelters, as Jewish Israelis celebrated the Shavuot holiday.
The Israel Defense Forces said another 70 rockets were then launched at the Mount Meron area, home to a sensitive air traffic control base. Ten more rockets were fired at the northern community of Zar’it, and an anti-tank guided missile struck a factory of the Plasan armored vehicle manufacturer in Kibbutz Sasa, causing damage.
Later in the morning, a drone launched from Lebanon detonated in an open area near the northern community of Zivon, local authorities said.
Many of the rockets were shot down by air defenses, the military said.
There were no injuries in the attacks, but several rocket impacts sparked fires in northern Israel.
Some 25 firefighting teams and eight planes were working to extinguish fires near Amiad, in the Ein Zeitim forest, and near Beit Jann, the Fire and Rescue Service said.
Hezbollah took responsibility for the rocket and missile fire, claiming to have targeted several Israeli military sites, including the Meron air traffic control base and the Amiad camp — located some 20 kilometers from the border — as well as the Plasan factory.
Hezbollah said the attacks were a response to Tuesday night’s Israeli strike in southern Lebanon’s Jouaiyya — some 15 kilometers (9 miles) north of the border with Israel — which killed Abdullah and three other operatives
Abdullah had commanded Hezbollah’s Nasr unit, one of three regional divisions in south Lebanon. The unit is responsible for the region between Mount Dov and the Bint Jbeil area in south Lebanon, and is considered to be the terror group’s first line of attack and defense against Israel.
According to the IDF, Abdullah was the “most senior” Hezbollah commander it had killed amid the ongoing fighting.
Hezbollah referred to Abdullah as a commander in a statement announcing his death. The terror group rarely refers to its senior operatives slain in Israeli strikes as commanders. The only other operative referred to as a commander was Wissam al-Tawil, the deputy head of the terror group’s elite Radwan force, killed by Israel in January. Abdullah was considered to be senior to al-Tawil
Abdullah was behind numerous attacks on northern Israel in the past eight months, mostly against the city of Kiryat Shmona, and other towns and army positions in the Galilee Panhandle, Upper Galilee, and the Golan Heights area, the IDF said.
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