Hezbollah has launched more than 100 rockets 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 of reckoning” was under way as both sides appeared to be spiralling closer towards 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.
One rocket struck near a residential building in Kiryat Bialik, a city near Haifa, wounding at least three people and setting buildings and cars on fire.
Israel’s Magen David Adom rescue service said four people were wounded by shrapnel in the barrage.
Lebanon’s Health Ministry said three people were killed and another four wounded in Israeli strikes near the border, without saying whether they were civilians or combatants.
Hezbollah’s deputy leader Naim Kassem said his group is now in an “open-ended battle of reckoning” with Israel, threatening more displacement for people in Israel’s north.
“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.
He said a barrage of rockets fired by the group deep into Israel early on Sunday was only the beginning, vowing to destroy Israel’s economy.
The rocket barrage came after an Israeli air strike in Beirut on Friday killed at least 45 people, including one of Hezbollah’s top leaders and several other fighters, as well as 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 ABC’s This Week that 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 carried out strikes across southern Lebanon over the past 24 hours, hitting about 400 militant sites, including rocket launchers.
Lt Col Nadav Shoshani, an Israeli military spokesman, said those strikes had thwarted an even larger attack.
“Hundreds of thousands of civilians have come under fire across a lot of northern Israel,” he said.
“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 Iran-backed militant groups there claimed to have launched a drone attack on Israel.
School was cancelled across northern Israel, and the Health Ministry said all hospitals in the north would begin moving operations to protected areas within the medical centres.
In a separate development, Israeli forces raided the West Bank bureau of Al-Jazeera, which it had banned earlier this year, accusing it of serving as a mouthpiece for militant groups, allegations denied by the pan-Arab broadcaster.
Israel and Hezbollah have traded fire since the outbreak of the war in Gaza nearly a year ago, when the militant group began firing rockets in solidarity with the Palestinians and its fellow Iran-backed ally Hamas.
The low-level fighting has killed dozens of people in Israel, hundreds in Lebanon, and displaced tens of thousands on both sides of the frontier.
Until recently, neither side was believed to be seeking an all-out war, and Hezbollah has so far stopped short of targeting Tel Aviv or major civilian infrastructure.
But in recent weeks, Israel has shifted its focus from Gaza to Lebanon.
Hezbollah has said it would only halt its attacks if the war in Gaza ends, as a ceasefire there appears increasingly elusive.
The war in Gaza began with Hamas’s October 7 attack into Israel, in which Palestinian militants killed about 1,200 people and took about 250 others hostage.
They are still holding about 100 captives, a third of whom are believed to be dead.
“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.” - @UN Special Coordinator for #Lebanon @JeanineHennis. pic.twitter.com/CNXSO4VhTF
— UNSCOL (@UNSCOL) September 22, 2024
More than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
It does not say how many were fighters, but says women and children make up more than half of the dead.
Families of the hostages have raised fears that a war in the north would distract from their plight and further complicate the negotiations over their release.
The UN envoy for Lebanon called on all parties to pull back.
“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,” Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert said in an X post.
Hezbollah said it had launched dozens of Fadi 1 and Fadi 2 missiles – a new type of weapon the group had not used before – at the Ramat David airbase, south east of Haifa, “in response to the repeated Israeli attacks that targeted various Lebanese regions and led to the fall of many civilian martyrs”.
In July, the group released a video with what it said was footage it had filmed of the base with surveillance drones.
Hezbollah also said it had targeted the facilities of the Rafael defence firm, which has its headquarters in Haifa, calling it retaliation for the wireless devices attack.
It did not provide evidence, and the Israeli military declined to comment on the statement.
Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate against Israel for a wave of explosions that hit pagers and walkie-talkies belonging to Hezbollah members on Tuesday and Wednesday, killing at least 37 people – including two children – and wounding about 3,000.
The attacks were widely blamed on Israel, which has not confirmed or denied responsibility.
On Friday, an Israeli air strike took down an eight-storey building in a densely populated neighbourhood in Beirut’s southern suburbs as Hezbollah members were meeting in the basement, according to Israel.
Among those killed was Akil, a top Hezbollah official who commanded the group’s special forces unit, known as the Radwan Force.
Lebanese authorities say at least seven women and three children were killed in Friday’s air strike and that dozens more were wounded.
It was the deadliest strike on Beirut since the month-long war in 2006 between Israel and Hezbollah.
Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant said that the attack broke up the group’s chain of command while taking out Akil, who he said was responsible for Israeli deaths.
Akil had been on the US most wanted list for years, with a seven million dollar reward, over his alleged role in the 1983 bombing of the US embassy in Beirut and the taking of American and German hostages in Lebanon during the civil war in the 1980s.
