The IDF says dozens of rockets were fired into Israel from Lebanon

Recent Israel actions in the war against Hamas have not been attributed to Israel, but it’s a reminder of how the military is operating in Gaza

In the last 24 hours, Israel bombed an apartment building in Lebanon, which killed a Hezbollah commander, followed by a series of simultaneous cellphone and walkie-talkie blasts in Lebanon.

In April, Israel bombed a building that was part of the Iranian Embassy complex in Damascus, Syria, killing seven people, including a general who oversaw Iran’s covert military operations in Syria and Lebanon. Iran launched a missile and drones attack on Israel for the first time in decades, in response to the country’s actions.

These attacks have come at the same time as Israel’s wide-scale military offensive in Gaza, which health officials there say have killed more than 41,000 Palestinians. The United Nations, rights groups and some governments have accused Israel of using disproportionate force in its war in Gaza against Hamas. Israel says its use of force is justified and legal.

A series of operations, including assassinations and sabotage, over the years have targeted senior leaders involved with Iran’s nuclear program. In 2007, a nuclear scientist was poisoned, and in 2010, a remote-controlled bomb attached to a motorcycle killed another scientist.

Israel used the heart of it’s never-acknowledged nuclear arms program as a testing ground for the Stuxnet computer worm. The destructive program was eventually credited with wiping out roughly a fifth of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges, which Tehran needs to produce a nuclear weapon.

They appeared to target a bigger group of people than other attacks. The attacks on devices this week and many others that have been attributed to Israel have not been claimed by Israel. They include:

From 2010 to 2012, four people with links to Iran’s nuclear program were killed by hit men riding motorcycles. In one case, in 2010, an assassin attached a sticky bomb to a car door. Gunmen got into vehicles in the Iranian capital of Tehran and shot through the window before speeding off.

In November 2020 a truckmounted machine gun was attached to a remote-controlled robotic apparatus and shot the top nuclear scientist in Iran, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. Experts said it had taken a long time to plan the operation.

The Israeli-Hezbollah war in Gaza: Hamas retaliated against Israel with a wave of rocket fire

Israeli media reported that rockets fired from Lebanon early Sunday were intercepted in the areas of Haifa and Nazareth, which are further south than most of the rocket fire to date. Israel canceled school across the north, deepening the sense of crisis.

Air raid sirens were heard across the region as the rockets streaked over a wider and deeper area of northern Israel. The Israeli military said rockets had been fired “toward civilian areas,” pointing to a possible escalation after previous barrages had mainly been aimed at military targets.

Israel’s Magen David Adom rescue service said it treated four people for shrapnel wounds, including a 76-year-old man who was moderately wounded near Haifa, where buildings were damaged and cars set on fire. It was not immediately clear if the damage was caused by a rocket or an Israeli interceptor.

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 displaced tens of thousands of people on both sides of the frontier.

Hezbollah said it had launched dozens of Fadi 1 and Fadi 2 missiles, a new type of weapon the group had not used before, in response to the repeated Israeli attacks that targeted various Lebanon regions.

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 around 3,000. The Israeli government has not commented on the attacks.

Lebanon’s health minister, Firass Abiad, told reporters Saturday that at least seven women and three children were killed in Friday’s airstrike on the building. He said another 68 people were injured, including 15 who were hospitalized.

It was the deadliest strike on Beirut since the bruising monthlong war in 2006 between Israel and Hezbollah, and the casualty count could grow, with 23 people still missing, a government official said.

The Defense Minister said the attack broke the group’s chain of command as they took out Akil, who he claimed was responsible for Israeli deaths. He had been on the U.S. most wanted list for years, with a $7 million reward, over his alleged role in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut and the taking of American and German hostages in Lebanon during the civil war in the 1980s.