Israel’s military says a Hezbollah drone killed four soldiers at one of its northern bases, as it expanded its bombardments of Lebanon and troops battled militants across the border.
The attack on a military training camp in Binyamina, near Haifa, is the deadliest such assault on an Israeli base since September 23, when Israel increased its attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Emergency services reported more than 60 wounded.
Whole families killed in school air strike: Gaza officials
Authorities in Gaza, meanwhile, said the death toll from an Israeli strike on Sunday, local time, on a school being used as a shelter for displaced people had risen to 15, including whole families.
And as fighting raged between Israel and Hezbollah forces in Lebanon’s south, United Nations peacekeepers said they were again in the firing line.
They said Israeli troops “forcibly” entered a UN position with two tanks, after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on the force to withdraw from the area.
Israel’s military said a tank had backed into the UN post while under fire.
‘Attack drones’ injure dozens at military base
Iran-backed Hezbollah said late on Sunday that it launched “a squadron of attack drones” at the Binyamina camp, about 30 kilometres south of the major city of Haifa.
The strike was in response to Israeli attacks, including air strikes on Thursday, that Lebanon’s health ministry said killed at least 22 people in central Beirut.
In a later statement, Hezbollah warned Israel that “what it witnessed today in southern Haifa is nothing compared to what awaits it if it decides to continue its aggression against our noble and dear people”.
An Israeli volunteer rescue service, United Hatzalah, said its teams in Binyamina assisted “over 60 wounded people” with injuries from mild to critical.
Hezbollah, which is a proscribed terrorist organisation in Australia, has been firing rockets and drones into Israel for more than a year in support of Hamas in Gaza, following that group’s terrorist attack in southern Israel on October 7, 2023.
Since late September, however, Hezbollah’s strikes have reached further into Israel.
Israel’s sophisticated air defences have intercepted most of the projectiles, with few casualties caused by strikes or falling debris.
Clashes spread beyond traditional strongholds
Israel’s recent strikes have increasingly focused on areas beyond Hezbollah’s traditional strongholds in southern Beirut, and Lebanon’s south and east.
Israel said its air force hit “Hezbollah launchers, anti-tank missile posts, weapons storage facilities” and other targets, while on the ground its soldiers “eliminated dozens” of fighters.
Lebanon’s official National News Agency (NNA) said Israeli forces had “escalated their attacks” on southern Lebanon with “successive air strikes” pounding several border villages.
It later reported that an Israeli strike on Mayfadoun, near Nabatiyeh, in southern Lebanon, had killed five people and wounded one other.
Hezbollah said its forces clashed several times with Israeli troops who tried to “infiltrate” villages along the border.
Before the drone strike, it had said it launched a salvo of rockets at a “base in southern Haifa”.
The group later aired an audio recording of its slain leader Hassan Nasrallah calling on fighters to “defend this holy and blessed land and this honourable people”.
Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli air strike in south Beirut on September 27, and several other senior commanders of the movement have also been killed.
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