Israel has launched several air attacks on Beirut’s southern suburbs after the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah fired volleys of rockets at northern Israel, with one drone targeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu‘s holiday home.
Netanyahu’s spokesman said one of three drones launched from Lebanon hit Netanyahu’s residence in the town of Caesarea on Saturday, adding that he was not in the vicinity and there were no casualties.
The two other drones were intercepted, the Israeli military said, adding that a total of more than 100 rockets were fired across northern Israel from Lebanon, killing one person and injuring at least 13 others.
Iran-aligned Hezbollah has been trading fire with Israel since last October last year.
Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh, reporting from Amman, Jordan, said the Israeli authorities are treating the attack on Netanyahu’s house as an “assassination attempt”.
“Of course, there is no way to verify that or to say for sure that this was an assassination attempt, but that’s how gravely the Israeli security establishment is viewing this incident,” she said.
“The fact that a drone was able to go undetected 70km from the Lebanese border, no sirens went off, and it struck the intended target, that has caused a lot of concern in Israel and in the Israeli security establishment.”
She said “a large volley of rockets” from Lebanon were used as decoys to launch the drone attack on Netanyahu’s house. Sirens were activated across northern Israel, including the cities of Galilee and Haifa, she said.
Haifa is the largest city in northern Israel and is seen as a strategic port city that is home to 300,000 people and the country’s naval headquarters.
“The sirens went off just right after we got confirmation that a drone attack actually succeeded in targeting and striking the house of the Israeli prime minister in Caesarea,” Odeh said.
Israeli strikes
Later on Saturday, the Lebanese Health Ministry reported that four people were killed and 13 others wounded in an Israeli airstrike on an apartment building in the eastern town of Baaloul in Western Bekaa.
Israeli airstrikes also hit the southern suburbs of Beirut, Lebanese state media said, shortly after Israel ordered residents to evacuate, marking the first attacks in three days on the area.
The news agency AFP footage showed plumes of smoke rising over the area, less than an hour after the Israeli military issued an evacuation order.
Lebanon’s official National News Agency reported two Israeli strikes on the same building in the neighbourhood of Haret Hreik, and later added that “Israeli warplanes” had struck the Al-Umara neighbourhood in nearby Choueifat.
Israeli military spokesman Avichay Adraee issued an “urgent warning to residents of the southern suburb (of Dahiyeh), specifically those in… Haret Hreik neighbourhood”.
“You are located near facilities and interests belonging to Hezbollah, against which the IDF (Israeli military) will be operating in the near future,” he wrote in Arabic on X.
He later also issued warnings for the Burj al-Barajneh and Choueifat neighbourhoods.
On September 23, Israel launched an intense air campaign on Lebanon and later sent in ground forces after nearly a year of cross-border exchanges with Hezbollah over the Gaza war.
Since late September, the war has left at least 1,418 people dead in Lebanon, according to an AFP tally of Lebanese health ministry figures, though the real toll is likely higher.__Al Jazeera
