Photo credit: NPR
A Hezbollah drone attack on an army base in central Israel killed four soldiers and severely wounded about sixty others on Sunday, the military said.
CBC News reports that the Lebanon-based Hezbollah called the attack near Binyamina city a retaliation for Israeli strikes on Beirut on Thursday that killed 22 people. It later said it targeted Israel’s elite Golani brigade, launching dozens of missiles to occupy Israeli air defence systems during the assault by “squadrons” of drones.
With Israel’s advanced air defence systems, it’s rare for so many people to be injured by drones or missiles. Hezbollah and Israel have traded fire almost daily in the year since the war in Gaza began.
During the Israeli holiday of Yom Kippur on Saturday, a drone struck a suburb of Tel Aviv and caused damage but no injuries.
The strike came on the same day that the United States announced it would send a new air defence system to Israel to help bolster its protective missiles.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called on United Nations peacekeepers to obey the Israeli military’s warnings to evacuate Lebanon immediately as the fighting intensifies.
Israeli forces have repeatedly fired upon locations where first responders and UN peacekeepers were present since the start of the ground operation against Hezbollah. The military has accused the Iran-backed militant group of using ambulances to ferry fighters and weapons and says Hezbollah operates in the vicinity of the peacekeepers without providing evidence.
In a video addressed to the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who has been banned from entering Israel, Netanyahu called for peacekeepers to need Isreal’s warnings to evacuate, accusing them of “providing a human shield” to Hezbollah.
However, the United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon has refused to leave its positions in southern Lebanon.
Inside Gaza, too, an Israeli airstrike killed at least 20 people, including children, at a school Sunday night, according to two local hospitals. The school was sheltering some of the Palestinians displaced by the war.
Explosions also hit early Monday outside Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital 9n Deir al-Balah, killing three people and injuring about 50 others, the hospital said. Tents caught fire while residents of the Central Gaza community carried the injured into hospital.
