Israel’s military said a Hezbollah drone killed four soldiers at one of their northern bases on Sunday as Israel stepped up bombardment of Lebanon and troops battled militants on the border, while shelters in Gaza were again hit by Israeli strikes.
The Israeli airstrike killed at least 20 people, including children at a school in Gaza, two local hospitals reported. The school in Nuseirat shelters many Palestinians displaced by the war.
Meanwhile, explosions went off early Monday morning outside the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, killing three people and wounding about 50, the hospital said. Tents caught fire and residents in the central Gaza Strip carried the wounded to the hospital.
As fighting between Israel and Hezbollah forces raged in southern Lebanon, UN peacekeepers said they were back in the line of fire. They said Israeli troops “forcibly” entered the UN position with two tanks after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on the forces to withdraw from the area. The Israeli military said the tank entered the UN post under fire.
Hezbollah drone attack
Iranian-backed Hezbollah said late Sunday it had launched a “squadron of attack drones” at Camp Binyamina, 30 kilometres (20 miles) south of the major city of Haifa.
The strike was in response to Israeli attacks, including airstrikes on Thursday that killed at least 22 people in the centre of Beirut, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.
The attack on a military training camp was the deadliest assault on an Israeli base since September 23, when Israel stepped up strikes against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Emergency services reported more than 60 wounded.
In a follow-up statement, Hezbollah warned Israel that “what it witnessed today in southern Haifa is no comparison to what awaits it if it decides to continue its aggression against our noble and dear people.”
Israel’s volunteer rescue service United Hatzalah said its teams in Binyamin treated “more than 60 wounded” with injuries ranging from minor to critical.
Hezbollah has been firing rockets and drones at Israel for more than a year in support of Hamas in Gaza. Since late September, however, its strikes have been moving further inland. Israel’s modern air defences intercept most of the projectiles, with few casualties from the strikes and falling debris.
Defend the “blessed land”
Recently, Israel has increasingly targeted areas outside Hezbollah’s traditional strongholds in southern Beirut, as well as in southern and eastern Lebanon.
Israel said its air force hit “Hezbollah launchers, anti-tank missile posts, weapons depots” and other targets, while on the ground its soldiers “killed dozens” of militants.
Lebanon’s official National News Agency reported that Israeli forces “stepped up their attacks” on southern Lebanon, launching “successive air strikes” on several border villages. The agency later said an Israeli strike on Mayfadoun, near Nabatiyeh, in southern Lebanon, killed five people and wounded another.
Hezbollah said its forces had clashed several times with Israeli troops trying to “infiltrate” villages along the border. Before the drone strike, Hezbollah said it fired a volley of rockets at a “base in southern Haifa.” The group later aired an audio recording of its slain leader Hassan Nasrallah urging fighters to “defend this holy and blessed land and this honourable nation.”
Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli airstrike in southern Beirut on September 27, and several other senior commanders of the movement were also killed.
The Israeli military said some 115 shells fired by Hezbollah had hit Israeli territory by Sunday afternoon. A Hezbollah fighter was captured coming out of a tunnel in southern Lebanon on Sunday, the Israeli military said, the first such claim since the ground offensive began.
Hamas triggered the Gaza war with its deadliest attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, killing 1,206 people, mostly civilians, according to official Israeli figures. That number includes hostages who died in captivity. According to the Hamas-run Gaza Strip’s health ministry, more than 42,000 people, most of them civilians, have died there since the start of the Israeli military campaign. The UN considers these figures reliable.
According to official figures, Israeli strikes in Lebanon have killed more than 1,300 people since September 23, including on Saturday. That number exceeds the total of 1,200 deaths in Lebanon – mostly civilians – during the last war between Hezbollah and Israel in 2006, when 160 people, mostly soldiers, were killed in Israel.
The Pentagon said it would send a high-altitude anti-missile system and a crew of US military personnel to Israel to help the ally defend itself against a possible Iranian attack.
Nicola Fratoianni, Italian politician and leader of the Italian Left party, commented on events in the Middle East on X:
“We have been repeating for months that Netanyahu is a war criminal as the genocide in Gaza continues. Now repeated attacks on #Unifil in #Lebanon. Suspend the EU-Israel association treaty, sanctions against the Israeli government, recognise a Palestinian state.”
