JERUSALEM: Israel’s military said on Sunday 18 of its soldiers were injured, one of them seriously, when a drone struck their position in the occupied Golan Heights, which border Lebanon.
Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement has fired multiple barrages of rockets into northern Israel in retaliation for an Israeli strike which killed one of its senior commanders.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) reportedly identified more than 200 projectiles that crossed the border on Wednesday. Some triggered fires, but no casualties were reported.
It came as a top Hezbollah official vowed that the Iran-backed group would increase the intensity, force and quantity of its attacks.
He was speaking at the funeral of Taleb Sami Abdullah, the field commander targeted in a strike in southern Lebanon on Tuesday night.
There have been exchanges of fire across the Israel-Lebanon border almost every day since the day after the start of the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza on 7 October.
Hezbollah has said it is acting in support of the Palestinian group. Both are proscribed as terrorist organisations by Israel, the UK and other countries.
Vast swathes of the western Galilee in northern Israel were consumed by wildfires on Monday after rockets launched by Hezbollah set the area alight.
Israeli media reported more than 10 villages threatened by fires, with over 2,500 acres of land burnt. Eleven people were hospitalised as a result of smoke inhalation.
The most severe wildfires were concentrated in the northern Israeli city of Kiryat Shimona, which has been a focal point of Hezbollah and affiliated group's attacks since October.
According to NASA satellite imagery between Monday and Tuesday, blazes were most severe in and around Kiryat Shimona.
https://www.newarab.com/news/over-2500-acres-burnt-north-israel-hezbollah-rockets
Lebanon’s Hezbollah said on Monday it had launched a squadron of drones towards the headquarters of the Israeli military’s Galilee formation in an intensification of cross-border violence between the two adversaries, Reuters reports.
While Hezbollah has previously launched drones at Israel during hostilities that began in October, it marked the first time the group had announced firing a squadron of them.
The hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel have rumbled on in parallel with the war between Israel and the Palestinian group, Hamas, in the Gaza Strip, raising concern about the risk of a bigger conflict across the Israeli-Lebanese border.
Hezbollah also said it had launched dozens of Katyusha rockets towards Israeli targets in the occupied Golan Heights.
Air raid sirens sounded numerous times across northern Israel, sending residents running for shelter. The Israeli military said it had intercepted one drone from Lebanon carrying explosives, and at least two others fell in northern Israel.
Continuous rocket and drone launches since Sunday have set off massive wild fires in Israel’s north.
The military also said it carried out strikes against Hezbollah compounds and one of its operatives.
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for Israel to occupy southern Lebanon and "severely damage" Beirut, in comments given to the press following a parliament session during which the Israeli government discussed the latest cease-fire proposal.
"The situation in the North is deteriorating," Smotrich said, cited by Israeli media. "We need to move the security zone from Israeli territory in Galilee to southern Lebanon, including a ground invasion."
He called for "the occupation of the territory and the removal of Hezbollah terrorists and hundreds of thousands of Lebanese — among whom Hezbollah is hiding, beyond the Litani River — combined with a deadly attack on all Lebanese infrastructures, the destruction of Hezbollah's centers of gravity and severe damage to the capital of terrorism in Beirut."
"We need to create a situation in which Lebanon is faced, for the next twenty years, with efforts to rebuild what remains after the blow inflicted on it, and not with waging terror against the State of Israel," said Smotrich, who leads the far-right Religious Zionism party, which is part of Netanyahu’s coalition government.