Israel and the Hezbollah militant group exchanged heavy fire across Lebanon’s border on Sunday, fueling fears of a wider conflict in the region as the monthslong war in Gaza continues to rage.
“Dozens of rockets hit Israel which destroyed homes, cars and communities,” Israel Defense Forces spokesman Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani said on X.
In a separate development, Israeli soldiers shut down Al Jazeera’s bureau in Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, on Sunday morning, a moved condemned by several journalist organizations.
The IDF said Hezbollah launched roughly 150 rockets, cruise missiles and drones at Israel. While many were intercepted by Israeli air defenses, “there were a small number of cases of hits and interception debris falling on” Israeli territory, it said.
Israel’s Magen David Adom rescue service said on X that three people were wounded by shrapnel in the barrage. Another rescue service, United Hatzalah, said it treated 20 people who were injured while heading for shelter.
Later, the IDF said its fighter jets had “struck dozens of Hezbollah terror targets, including launchers and military structures in dozens of areas in southern Lebanon.”
Hezbollah meanwhile, said it had launched dozens of rockets as part of its initial response to Friday’s airstrike on a densely populated suburb of Beirut that killed 45 people including senior leaders of the group. That attack followed the coordinated detonation of pagers and walkie-talkies belonging to Hezbollah members across Lebanon.
Speaking Sunday at the funeral procession for senior Hezbollah commander Ibrahim Akil, who was killed in Friday’s strike, Naim Qassem, Hezbollah’s deputy secretary general, said that the group would not disclose how it would respond to the attack but that “we have entered a new phase defined by an open reckoning.”
Separately, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an umbrella group of Iraqi militias backed by Iran, said it had also launched drones at Israel on Sunday.
In a video statement Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his military had “inflicted on Hezbollah a sequence of blows that they did not imagine.”
Reiterating his government’s intention to return displaced residents in northern Israel, he said, “No country can tolerate shooting at its residents, shooting at its cities — and we, the state of Israel, will not tolerate it either. We will do everything necessary to restore security.”
Israel and Hezbollah, which the U.S. has designated a terrorist organization, have traded fire since the outbreak of the war in Gaza that began with Hamas’ Oct. 7 terror attacks, in which about 1,200 people were killed and Palestinian militants took around 250 hostages. Around 100 people remain in captivity, although a third are believed to be dead.
Israel’s offensive in Gaza since then has killed more than 41,000 people, according to health officials in the enclave. Those figures do not differentiate between civilians and combatants.
Hezbollah said it began firing rockets in solidarity with the Palestinians and its fellow Iran-backed ally Hamas, and since then the low-level tit-for-tat attacks have killed dozens of people in Israel, hundreds in Lebanon, and displaced tens of thousands on both sides of the border.
The United Nations warned that the region was “on the brink of an imminent catastrophe.” In a statement posted on X, the United Nations’ special coordinator for Lebanon, Jeanine Hennis, said “it cannot be overstated enough: there is NO military solution that will make either side safer.”
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin “reaffirmed the United States’ commitment to Israel’s right to defend itself” in a call with Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, a Pentagon spokesperson said in a statement.
During a visit to the IDF’s Northern Command, Gallant said the events of the past week were “the most difficult in the history of Hezbollah’s existence.”
“We will continue to use all the means at our disposal to achieve our goal — ensuring the safe return of Israel’s northern communities to their homes,” he said Sunday.
Further south in the Gaza Strip, Israel’s air force killed seven people wounded several others in a strike on a compound that housed a former school, Gaza Civil Defense spokesperson Mahmoud Saber Basal said in a Telegram post Sunday. He added that the compound housed “hundreds of displaced people.”
The IDF said in a statement that Hamas was operating from the compound and that “numerous steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harm to uninvolved civilians, including the use of precise munitions, aerial surveillance, and additional intelligence information.”
Elsewhere, Israeli soldiers shut down Al Jazeera’s bureau in Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, on Sunday morning.
In an exchange broadcast live on Al Jazeera’s Arabic-language news channel, Israeli troops handed the network’s bureau chief, Walid al-Omari, an order shutting down the office for 45 days.
The IDF said in a statement that “the order was signed following a legal opinion and an up-to-date intelligence assessment that determined that the offices were being used to incite terror, to support terrorist activities and that the channel’s broadcasts endanger the security and public order in both the area and the State of Israel as a whole.”
Calling the allegations unfounded, the network said in a statement that the raid was “an affront to press freedom.”
“These oppressive measures are clearly intended to prevent the world from witnessing the reality of the situation in the occupied territories and the ongoing war on Gaza and the devastating impact on innocent civilians,” the statement added.
The move was condemned by the Foreign Press Association, which said in a statement that it was “deeply concerned by this escalation in threats to press freedom.” Urging the Israeli government to reconsider the measures, it added that “the restriction of foreign correspondents and the closure of news outlets signals a shift away from democratic values.”
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists said in a statement that the raid was “deeply concerning.” It added that journalists “must be protected and allowed to work freely.”
Israel banned Al Jazeera from broadcasting within Israeli territory, but it had continued to broadcast from the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Last week, Israel’s government announced it was revoking the press credentials of Al Jazeera journalists in the country, four months after banning the channel from operating inside Israel.
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