Live Updates: Israel Targets Hezbollah Leader in Strike on Residential Buildings Near Beirut
Israeli and American officials said the attack was intended to kill Hassan Nasrallah, the head of the Iran-backed militia. Several residential buildings were destroyed south of the Lebanese capital.
Video verified by The New York Times shows the aftermath of Friday's attacks in southern Beirut.
Mourning the deaths of 15 family members after an Israeli airstrike hit a building on Friday.
Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
A series of airstrikes hit buildings on a block in southern Beirut.
The scene of an Israeli strike Friday in Beirut.
Reuters
The Israeli strikes Friday targeted Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah.
David Guttenfelder
An Israeli air defense system intercepting rockets fired from Lebanon.
Jalaa Marey/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel speaking Friday at the U.N. General Assembly in New York City.
Dave Sanders for The New York Times
Treating a victim after Friday's strike in Beirut.
Wael Hamzeh/EPA, via Shutterstock
A building hit by an Israeli strike in eastern Lebanon.
By AFP
The southern Lebanese town of Saksakiyeh following several Israeli strikes this week.
Associated Press
Israeli soldiers in northern Israel.
Atef Safadi/EPA, via Shutterstock
Air defenses intercepted missiles over Kiryat Shmona, a city near Israel's northern border with Lebanon.
Israeli forces destroyed several residential buildings south of Beirut, the Lebanese capital, on Friday afternoon, asserting that the central headquarters of Hezbollah was underneath them.
The target of the strikes was Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, according to eight Israeli and two American officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence. It was not immediately clear whether Mr. Nasrallah was in the buildings when they were hit.
The airstrikes came shortly after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel gave a defiant speech at the United Nations General Assembly, defending his government’s handling of the war in Gaza and its conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon and vowing to continue fighting despite international calls for cease-fires.
At least two people have been killed and 76 wounded in the latest strikes, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.
Lebanon’s health minister, Firass Abiad, said the toll was likely to rise. He said that the strikes had caused the “complete decimation” of four to six residential buildings, and that the number of casualties in hospitals was so far low because most people were still trapped.
“They are residential buildings. They were filled with people,” Mr. Abiad said in an interview. “Whoever is in those buildings is now under the rubble.”
It was the latest in a series of Israeli strikes on buildings in the Dahiya, a group of crowded neighborhoods south of Beirut where Hezbollah dominates, and one that is also home to shops, businesses and apartment buildings.
Najib Mikati, the Lebanese prime minister, said the latest attack south of Beirut proved that “the Israeli enemy pays no heed at all to the efforts and international calls for a cease-fire.”
Photos and videos from the scene showed emergency workers searching the smoking rubble with flashlights and at least one heavy duty excavator digging through the piles of jagged concrete and twisted metal. Thick black smoke could be seen rising above Beirut’s skyline.
“It was like Judgment Day,” Hussein Awada, 54, who was in the Dahiya neighborhood of Borj al-Brajneh, said of the explosions that sent shock waves through the area. He said people were gathering outside, fearing that more buildings could be hit.
Videos and photos from the site of the strike, geolocated by The Times, show at least four buildings had been flattened in the latest attack, at least two of which were no less than seven-stories tall. The strikes also destroyed nearby vehicles and left craters in the streets about 700 feet away.
Israel’s chief military spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said the strike had come after almost a year of Hezbollah firing rockets and drones at Israel. “Israel is doing what every sovereign state in the world would do,” he said.
Admiral Hagari said that Hezbollah had deliberately embedded its military operations in “the heart” of these residential neighborhoods, using Lebanese civilians as human shields.
While it is widely assumed that Hezbollah has covert bunkers in the Dahiya, their locations are unknown to most people in Lebanon. Hezbollah controls the area and Lebanese security forces rarely enter this Hezbollah stronghold, highlighting the powerful grip on Lebanon that the group has as an armed militia and a political force in the country.
At the U.N., Mr. Netanyahu said that defeating Hezbollah was essential to Israel’s survival and called the group “a terror army perched on our northern border.”
Hezbollah began launching rockets into northern Israel the day after the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel that set off the war in Gaza, in alliance with Hamas. Israel and Hezbollah have been trading fire ever since, displacing more than 160,000 people on either side of the border even before the conflict heated up in recent weeks. Over the past 10 days, Israel has shifted its military focus from Hamas in Gaza to Hezbollah in Lebanon, forcing tens of thousands more Lebanese to flee their homes.
Hezbollah, for its part, has pledged to continue its attacks on Israel until there is a cease-fire in Gaza, and the back-and-forth strikes have not ceased.
Here’s what else to know:
The United States responds: “The United States had no involvement in this operation, and did not have advanced warning,” Sabrina Singh, a Pentagon spokeswoman, told reporters at a briefing on Friday about the latest strikes near Beirut. But Ms. Singh did note that Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III spoke with his Israeli counterpart, Yoav Gallant, on Friday.
UN. official alarmed: Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, the top U.N. official in Lebanon, said on social media on Friday evening that she was “deeply alarmed and profoundly worried about the potential civilian impact” of Israel’s “massive strikes” in a densely populated neighborhood. She called for an urgent cease-fire.
Netanyahu gives no ground: In his speech, Mr. Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, made no mention of international efforts to broker cease-fires in Gaza and Lebanon. He also threatened Iran, which backs Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. According to his office, he will return to Israel on Friday evening, the Jewish Sabbath, a highly unusual move that underscores the gravity of the situation after the latest strikes south of Beirut targeting Hezbollah leaders.
Iran’s ire: Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, called an emergency meeting of the Supreme National Security Council on Friday night in response to reports that Mr. Nasrallah was the target of the strike, two Iranian officials with knowledge of the meeting said. The Iranian embassy in Lebanon called the latest strikes in Beirut’s southern suburbs “a reprehensible crime and reckless behavior” constituting “a dangerous escalation that changes the rules of the game.” World leaders fear that the mounting tensions between Israel and Hezbollah could draw Iran directly into the conflict and ignite a regional war.
War in Gaza: The Gazan Health Ministry said on Friday said that 39 people had been killed and 86 injured by the Israeli military in the previous 24 hours. The ministry, which does not distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths, said that the toll in Gaza since the war began last year had risen to more than 41,530 people killed, with more than 96,000 injured.
Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, will cut short his meetings at the U.N. General Assembly and travel back to Beirut following the Israeli attack, according to a statement from his office. In recent days, Mikati and Lebanese officials have been holding intense discussions on the sidelines of the event in New York about the U.S. and French cease-fire proposal.
Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Dannon, said Israel would continue to act preemptively. He did not offer details on the strikes in Lebanon that targeted Nasrallah but said: “Israel will not wait for terror to come to our doorstep. We will come to them first, and we will eliminate them.”
A house and a car were hit by a Hezbollah rocket in the attack on Safed, according to the Israeli military. There were no immediate reports of deaths or serious casualties; Israeli paramedics said a woman was lightly injured by a blast in the recent rocket barrages from Lebanon.
Four hours after the Israeli strike, Lebanese television networks showed firefighters still working to extinguish blazes at the site. Others showed people standing outside hospitals, many of which had issued a mass casualty alert that called in off-duty doctors and health workers to assist in treating victims.
Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary general of Hezbollah, speaking on a screen in Baalbek, Lebanon, in 2018.Credit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
For almost two decades, Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary general of Hezbollah — who was targeted in an Israeli attack on Friday and whose status remains unclear — has avoided public appearances out of concern that he would be assassinated.
The beard beneath the black turban marking him as a Shiite Muslim cleric has turned almost white over his 32 years in charge of Hezbollah, during which time Mr. Nasrallah, 64, has built it into a potent force. Hezbollah has become both a political organization that holds sway in the fractious, dysfunctional efforts to govern Lebanon and an army equipped with ballistic missiles that can threaten Tel Aviv.
The leader of the strongest militant group that Iran has helped to create in the region, Mr. Nasrallah has extended its reach well beyond Lebanon. Hezbollah fighters were instrumental in shoring up the government of President Bashar al-Assad next door in Syria when it was threatened by a popular uprising that started in 2011. Designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, Hezbollah has helped to train Hamas fighters, as well as militias in Iraq and Yemen.
Mr. Nasrallah is known, according to Arab tradition, as Abu Hadi or father of Hadi, after his eldest son, who was 18 when he died, in September 1997, in a firefight with the Israelis. Mr. Nasrallah has at least three other children.
Image
Mr. Nasrallah on a large poster in Beirut in 2017.Credit...Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
He is believed to live modestly and rarely socializes outside Hezbollah’s ruling circles, eschewing public appearances and the telephone since the 2006 war against Israel. That war, which was set off when Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers during a cross-border raid, ended after 34 days of combat with both sides declaring victory. Afterward, Hezbollah was lauded across the Arab world, and took on an increasingly active role in conflicts around the region.
Mr. Nasrallah is a powerful orator with a robust command of classical Arabic. He laces his speeches with references to restoring lost Arab virility, a message that resonates across the region.
He comes across as less dour than most Shiite clerics, partly because of hisslight lisp and a propensity to crack jokes. He has never pushed hard-line Islamic rules, like veils for women.The state within a state that he helped build with Iranian and expatriate financing as Lebanon struggled to emerge from a long civil war includes hospitals, schools and other social services.
Born in 1960 in Beirut, Mr. Nasrallah grew up in a mixed neighborhood of impoverished Christian Armenians, Druse, Palestinians and Shiites. His father had a small vegetable stand.
Image
Supporters of Hezbollah watched a televised speech by Mr. Nasrallah in 2018, urging them to participate in forthcoming elections.Credit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
He studied briefly in a seminary in Qum, Iran, in 1989 and considered Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolutionto be the model for Shiites to end their traditional second-class status in the Muslim world.
Security around Mr. Nasrallah has long been extraordinary, particularly given that an Israeli rocket incinerated his predecessor. When he granted a rare interview to The New York Times in 2002, the reporter and photographer were blindfolded and driven around the southern suburbs of Beirut for a short time before the meeting. His security team then inspected absolutely everything that would enter the room, even unscrewing the pens to make sure that they contained only ink.
Hezbollah has exchanged artillery barrages with Israel since the war in Gaza started, but has been hesitant to bring its full arsenal to bear, given that many Lebanese, weary of grinding economic problems and general chaos, do not want another war.
On Sept. 19, in his most recent televised remarks, he blamed Israel for the exploding pagers and walkie-talkies that killed dozens of his foot soldiers and wounded several thousand more in the days before. “This retribution will come,” he said. “Its manner, size, how and where — these are things we will certainly keep to ourselves, in the narrowest circles even among us.”
Image
Watching a speech by Mr. Nasrallah this month in Beirut.Credit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has called an emergency meeting of the Supreme National Security Council at his home compound, according to two Iranian officials with knowledge of the meeting. They said the meeting was in response to Israel’s strike in Beirut that targeted the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah.
The aftermath of Israeli strikes on Friday in Beirut’s suburbs.Credit...Ibrahim Amro/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
When Israel unleashed deadly strikes on residential buildings south of Beirut late Friday in an attempt to target Hezbollah’s leader, the deafening explosions rattled the entire neighborhood, said Rabia Ali, a Syrian refugee and mother of three, and left her children “shaking with fear.”
“They were loud, loud,” she said of the blasts that sent shock waves and smoke through the surrounding streets.
Standing on a road near the strike site afterward, Ms. Ali said that she, her children and a cousin had fled the home where they had been staying — though they did not have anywhere to go.
At least two people were killed and 76 others wounded in the strikes, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. Videos and photos from the site of the strike that were geolocated by The Times show at least four buildings had been flattened; at least two were no less than seven-stories high. The strikes also destroyed nearby vehicles and left craters in the streets about 700 feet away.
The health minister, Dr. Firass Abiad, had said earlier that most people were still trapped under the rubble, and the toll was expected to rise.
Image
Lebanon’s health minister said the toll from the strike was likely to rise.Credit...Wael Hamzeh/EPA, via Shutterstock
He said the Israeli strikes had caused a “complete decimation” of four to six residential buildings. “They are residential buildings — they were filled with people,” Dr. Abiad told The New York Times. “Whoever is in those buildings is now under the rubble.”
Lebanon’s civil defense agency said paramedics and emergency workers were still trying retrieve the dead and injured.
The Israeli military spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said the strikes had targeted Hezbollah’s headquarters, which he said was underneath residential buildings in the southern suburbs of Beirut, the Lebanese capital. The strikes were among the most intense near Beirut since the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah began last October.
Image
Lebanese paramedics and emergency workers at the scene.Credit...Ibrahim Amro/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
“After almost a year of Israel warning the world and telling them that Hezbollah must be stopped, Israel is doing what every sovereign state in the world would do if they had a terror organization that seeks their destruction on their border,” Admiral Hagari said.
The strikes occurred barely an hour after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel finished speaking before the U.N. General Assembly in New York. Thick, black smoke spiraled into the sky after the explosions.
Residents of the Dahiya, crowded neighborhoods south of Beirut where Hezbollah holds sway, described a terrifying series of blasts that drove them to flee, many on foot and most without any possessions, even their ID cards.
Image
Lebanese soldiers closed off several nearby streets.Credit...Bilal Hussein/Associated Press
“The whole neighborhood seems like it’s destroyed,” said Khawla Sheikh, another Syrian refugee who had been living in the neighborhood and had fled with her six children. “I can’t describe how bad it is.”
Lebanese TV broadcast images of emergency workers with flashlights picking their way through mounds of smoking rubble at the site of the Israeli strikes. At least one heavy duty excavator was digging through piles of jagged concrete and twisted metal.
Lebanese soldiers closed off several nearby streets, as the sounds of ambulance sirens wailed throughout the area.
Image
A vehicle fell into a crater from the strike.Credit...Bilal Hussein/Associated Press
“It was like Judgment Day — I can’t describe it,” said Hussein Awada, 54, who was in the Dahiya neighborhood of Borj al-Brajneh when the explosions erupted.
Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, the top U.N. official in Lebanon, said she was “deeply alarmed and profoundly worried about the potential civilian impact” of Israel’s “massive strikes” in the densely populated neighborhood.
“The city is still shaking with fear and panic widespread. All must urgently cease-fire,” she wrote on social media.
Four hours after the Israeli strikes, Lebanese television networks showed firefighters still working to extinguish blazes at the scene of the attacks. Others showed people standing outside hospitals, many of which had issued a mass casualty alert — meaning off-duty doctors and health workers had been called in to assist in treating victims.
As night deepened, people gathered on sidewalks, fearful that more buildings could be hit — or collapse.
In a post on social media, the Iranian embassy in Lebanon called the strikes in Beirut’s southern suburbs “a reprehensible crime and reckless behavior” that constitute “a dangerous escalation that changes the rules of the game.” Mojtaba Amani, Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, was wounded last week when thousands of wireless devices belonging to Hezbollah members exploded.
In Karak Nouh, a town in eastern Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, dozens of people attended a mass funeral today for the Shoaib family. An Israeli strike overnight killed 15 members of the family, leaving a sole survivor.
Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, the top U.N. official in Lebanon, said she was “deeply alarmed and profoundly worried about the potential civilian impact” of Israel’s “massive strikes” targeting Hezbollah’s top leadership in a densely populated neighborhood south of Beirut. “The city is still shaking with fear,” she wrote on social media.
Videos taken after the airstrikes show that they flattened at least these two large apartment buildings in a densely populated neighborhood south of Beirut, known as the Dahiya. It is unclear how many people lived in the buildings or if they housed any shops or offices. Lebanon’s health minister has said that the strikes caused the “complete decimation” of four to six residential buildings.
At least 2 people have been killed and 76 wounded in the airstrikes Friday, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. The health minister, Firass Abiad, cautioned earlier that most people were still trapped under the rubble. The death toll was expected to rise, he said.
Image
Credit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
“It was like Judgment Day. I can't describe it,” said Hussein Awada, 54, who was in the neighborhood of Borj al-Brajneh when the explosions sent shock waves and smoke through the surrounding streets. He said people were gathering on sidewalks, fearing that more buildings could be hit.
Videos and photos, verified and geolocated by The New York Times, show the aftermath of a series of airstrikes just south of Beirut. Craters in the street were observed about 700 feet away from the flattened buildings along with destroyed vehicles. Emergency responders are also seen digging through rubble near apartment buildings.
Video broadcast on Al Jazeera shows rescue workers climbing mountains of smoking rubble, as well as at least one heavy duty excavator digging through piles of jagged concrete and twisted metal.
“The United States had no involvement in this operation and did not have advanced warning,” Sabrina Singh, the deputy Pentagon press secretay, said during a news conference Friday. She said that Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III spoke today with his Israeli counterpart, Yoav Gallant.
Austin and Gallant were talking on the phone as the operation was underway, Singh said. She added that the United States continued to press for a diplomatic solution.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, will return tonight from New York to Israel, his office said in a statement. It is highly unusual for Netanyahu to conduct state flights on the Jewish Sabbath, underscoring the gravity of the situation following the strikes south of Beirut targeting Hezbollah leaders.
Thick black smoke can still be seen rising above Beirut’s skyline. The sheer scale of these strikes was unlike any since the conflict began last October.
Residents of Borj al-Barajneh described a terrifying series of blasts that drove them to flee the neighborhood, most of them without any possessions, even their ID cards. “The whole neighborhood seems like it’s destroyed,” said Khawla Sheikh, a Syrian refugee who was living in the neighborhood and fled with her 11 children. “I can’t describe how bad it is.”
Lebanon’s health minister, Firass Abiad, said that there had been a “complete decimation” of four to six residential buildings as a result of the Israeli strikes. He said that the number of casualties in hospitals was low so far because people were still trapped under the rubble. “They are residential buildings. They were filled with people,” Mr. Abiad said. “Whoever is in those buildings is now under the rubble.”
Ambulance sirens are sounding through the vicinity of the airstrike in the neighborhood south of Beirut. Lebanese soldiers have closed off several of the streets leading into the area.
Rabia Ali, a Syrian mother of three, was standing on a road near the strike site on Friday night, shaken. She said she had fled home with her children and a cousin after deafening explosions rattled the neighborhood, though she did not have anywhere to go. “They were loud, loud,” she said. “My children are shaking with fear.”
Najib Mikati, the Lebanese prime minister, said the latest attack south of Beirut proved that “the Israeli enemy pays no heed at all to the efforts and international calls for a cease-fire.” He called on the international community to deter Israel from continuing.
Smoke rising over southern Lebanon after Israeli strikes on Monday.Credit...Aziz Taher/Reuters
Over the last week alone, Israel launched more than 2,000 airstrikes against Hezbollah in Lebanon and continued its near-daily bombings against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Its air defenses also fended off attacks, in one instance intercepting a ballistic missile headed for Tel Aviv.
And there are no signs of the onslaught slowing. “We’re not stopping, while simultaneously preparing plans for the next phases,” the Israeli military spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said on Wednesday.
But how long can Israel keep it up?
Military and weapons experts say that is not clear. Israel, like many countries, is highly secretive about the weapons in its stockpile, and government spokespeople who vigorously safeguard that information did not respond to requests for comment.
Yet there are several reasons why experts believe Israel could outlast its adversaries in its two-front offensive, even while defending itself from approaching strikes. Israel’s defense industry churned out so many weapons last year that it was able to export some, even despite the war in Gaza beginning in October. The United States has sent Israel at least tens of thousands of missiles, bombs and artillery rounds in recent years.
And given the threats it has faced, Israel has almost certainly built up its stockpiles to sustain multiple conflicts at once — especially if Iran rallies its allied groups in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen to strike at the same time.
“It will not run out, because in the Middle East, you cannot run out of weapons,” said Yehoshua Kalisky, a military technology expert at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. “The leaders know how to calculate the amount of weapons that are needed, and what they would have to have in the stockpile, because in this jungle you have to be strong.”
Here is what we know about Israel’s weapons arsenal.
The demands on air defenses
Israel says it has been targeted by more than 9,300 Hezbollah rockets since Oct. 8, 2023. Although those attacks killed 49 people, Mr. Kalisky estimated that most of those rockets — 75 percent — were intercepted by Iron Dome, Israel’s vaunted air defense system.
Image
A rocket-intercepting Iron Dome battery in Ashkelon, southern Israel, in 2022.Credit...Ariel Schalit/Associated Press
U.S. officials reportedly assessed this summer that Iron Dome batteries could be overwhelmed in a full-blown war with Hezbollah. Analysts have estimated Hezbollah has stockpiled between 100,000 and 200,000 rockets and missiles.
But one indicator of Israel’s air defense arsenal is the sheer number of interceptor missiles it was able to fire against Iranian missiles and drones in a single night last April, said Tom Karako, a missile defense expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
On April 14, Israel shot down most of about 330 incoming drones, ballistic missiles and cruise missiles with its Iron Dome and Arrow 3 defensive weapons. Some were also intercepted by the United States and other allies. That showed what he said was “an amazing success” of Israeli air defenses that were clearly well-equipped.
Still, “there’s not enough Iron Domes in the world to catch all of the rockets that Hezbollah has,” he said. “Missile defense buys you time, but you have to use that time well to end the threat by other means.”
A ‘surplus’ of weapons made in Israel
Last year, Israel’s defense industry produced enough weapons “to have a capacity surplus to meet its own needs, within the country itself,” said Pieter Wezeman, a senior researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which tracks arms transfers.
In fact, Israeli companies produced so many arms in 2023 that they were able to export a record high $13 billion in weapons to foreign militaries.
With that kind of surplus, “we must assume that Israel is confident that it has the kind of arsenals which it can use in case the conflict would escalate further,” Mr. Wezeman said.
Defense industry companies generally do not release production numbers, in part for competitive reasons. But Mr. Wezeman said Israel’s weapons manufacturers focus largely on producing ammunition, guided bombs and missiles.
Tens of thousands of American imports
The United States is Israel’s largest arms supplier, and the only country that has delivered missiles and bombs to Israel over the last 15 years, according to the Stockholm institute, SIPRI.
SIPRI estimates that the Pentagon and American arms companies have delivered at least 29,100 guided bombs, artillery rockets and various missiles to Israel since 2009. More than a third were delivered in the last two years alone, and the 15-year total almost certainly is a low estimate, Mr. Wezeman said, since comprehensive weapons sales are rarely publicized and Congress is only notified of the most expensive arms transfers.
Image
The aftermath of an Israeli airstrike on a United Nations school complex in central Gaza in June, carried out with the American-made GBU-39 bomb.Credit...Mohammed Saber/EPA, via Shutterstock
In the weeks immediately following the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack that started the war in Gaza, the United States sent planeloads of weapons to Israel, including about 3,000 bombs and tens of thousands of artillery shells. The United States has also delivered at least $3.5 billion in unspecified “essential wartime procurement,” Israel’s Defense Ministry said in a statement Thursday.
But since May, the Biden administration has stopped sending Israel 2,000-pound bombs for fear they would cause mass casualties of civilians. And Israel is still waiting for additional bombs, guidance kits and fuses for munitions that it has asked the United States to send over the last year, according to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington research institute.
Bradley Bowman, a weapons expert there, said those requests show that Israel is trying to build up its stockpile.
“These are things that Israel needs,” Mr. Bowman said. “If you look at the quantities of attacks going back and forth since Oct. 8, but especially in the last week or so, they are increasingly more frequent and more intense. So they’re clearly expending munitions.”
Tel Aviv this week. As back-and-forth strikes escalate between Israel and Hezbollah, a recent attempted strike was a reminder of the threat also posed by Yemen’s Houthis.Credit...Amir Cohen/Reuters
The normally bustling streets of Tel Aviv were subdued on Friday after an overnight siren jolted the city awake shortly before 1 a.m. with an incoming missile warning, the most recent in a series of once rare attempted aerial attacks that have become unnervingly frequent.
Dasha Matyashov, who runs a cafe in the southern neighborhood of Shapira, said her customers had anxiously compared notes about the sirens in recent weeks.
“Everyone who comes tells me where the siren caught them,” said Ms. Matyashov, who says her business has suffered during the conflict. “It’s the everyday talk, the agitation.”
The Israeli military said the missile on Friday was launched by Yemen’s Houthi militia, which like Hezbollah and Hamas is backed by Iran. It was intercepted outside Israeli airspace by the country’s Iron Dome system, which uses high-tech interceptors to zero in on rockets and other aerial threats.
The attempt was the second in just three days that an Iran-backed group aimed at the city. Hezbollah fired at Tel Aviv from Lebanon on Wednesday, in one of its deepest ever attacks into Israeli territory. There are no known fatalities from Hezbollah or Houthi fire since Israel began intense air raids in Lebanon last week. Hundreds have been killed in Lebanon in the Israeli strikes.
But as back-and-forth strikes escalate between Israel and Hezbollah, the latest attempted strike was a reminder of the threat that the Houthis also pose. On Friday, the group said in a statement that it would keep attacking Israel in the days and weeks to come “until the Israeli aggression on Gaza and Lebanon stops.”
Sirens sounded across a wide region of central Israel on a warm night, sending people scrambling for cover. Loud explosions from the air-defense system were heard as far away as Jerusalem, but the Israeli military said the missile caused no damage
It was the second time in around two weeks that the Houthis fired on central Israel. The group fired a surface-to-surface missile this month that was damaged, but not fully destroyed, by Israel’s interceptors, Israel’s military said, raining debris on some towns. And this summer, a drone launched by the group slipped past Israel’s air defenses and slammed into an apartment building near the United States Embassy branch office in Tel Aviv, killing one person and wounding eight others.
Zvika Yunayov, who owns a general store, said the increasingly frequent attempts to strike Tel Aviv had unnerved both himself and his customers, who were shopping less often. Business was especially slow on Friday.
“There are no people outside,” he said. “Everybody is afraid.”
Mr. Yunayov says he normally does not rush for shelter when alerts go off in Tel Aviv because “I have God with me.” But that has started to change.
He was driving home with his wife from a wedding when the sirens went off on Friday, he said, and quickly pulled over on the highway so that they could run under a nearby bridge. Things seem more dangerous now, and he worries that Israel finds itself in a tightening chokehold.
“It’s coming from the north, from Yemen, from the south,” he said. “It’s bad, and we can’t see the end.”
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment