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Reeling from a wave of audacious Israeli attacks, Hezbollah on Sunday responded with a missile barrage that went deeper into Israeli territory than most previous salvos, reinforcing fears of a broader regional war.
Air raid sirens went off early Sunday in scores of towns in northern Israel, and officials tightened restrictions on public gatherings in areas including the Golan Heights and Galilee. Most of Hezbollah’s missiles, fired from Lebanon, where it is based, were intercepted by Israel’s air defense system, and only minor injuries were reported. Nonetheless, it was clear that life had been disrupted in many places.
The barrage came after dozens of Israeli warplanes pounded Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon a day earlier. The Israeli military cast those strikes as a pre-emptive move.
But air raid sirens continued to sound in northern Israel as day broke on Sunday. Hezbollah said it targeted Israeli military bases, including one near Haifa, on the coast.
“Hezbollah has the ability to fire very long rockets and missiles,” an Israeli military spokesman, Nadav Shoshani, said Sunday, referring to their range. “We are ready for any scenario to protect Israeli civilians.”
The situation was also tense in Lebanon, where the detonation of pagers and walkie-talkies — widely attributed to Israel — and an Israeli airstrike created chaos in recent days. The attacks killed dozens of people, including some of Hezbollah’s top commanders, and injured thousands. They also fueled fears that Israel’s military was shifting its focus toward Hezbollah, and away from Hamas in Gaza, something it had been warning for months that it would do.
The war between Hamas and Israel is now nearly a year old. Over that period, Hezbollah has regularly fired missiles at Israel. But the most recent attacks represent an uptick in the conflict along Israel’s northern border.
Here’s what else to know:
Another front: In another sign of a broadening conflict, the Israeli military on Sunday said it had intercepted fire that came from the direction of Iraq, where an Iran-backed group claimed to have fired drones at Israel.
Friday attack: Lebanese authorities said the death toll had risen to at least 37, including three children, in Friday’s airstrike. Hezbollah confirmed the death of a top commander, Ibrahim Aqeel, who oversaw its operations against Israel. He was wanted by the United States for his role in two 1983 bombing attacks in Beirut that killed more than 350 people.
Gaza war: Israel has continued attacks in Gaza, saying it struck a school-turned-shelter in Gaza City on Saturday because it believed Hamas militants were using the building as a command center. Palestinian health authorities said the attack killed 22 people.
West Bank: Israeli troops on Sunday raided Al Jazeera’s office in Ramallah in the West Bank, the network said. The news outlet’s journalists were ordered to leave the premises and told that their office would be shut. In May, Israeli shut down Al Jazeera’s operations in Israel.
Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting from Rehovot, Israel.
Lebanon’s health ministry raised the death toll from Israel's airstrike on Friday in Beirut. It said that at least 45 people — including women and children — were killed. Rescuers continue to search through the rubble of the two high-rise apartment buildings. Many people are still missing.
The Israeli military said that it had intercepted dozens of “projectiles” fired by Hezbollah earlier in the day. But some fell in and around the Haifa district and caused fires, which were being put out by fire crews.
Hezbollah in the past few hours has fired more than a hundred “aerial threats” at civilian areas in Israel, the Israeli military said, adding it has resumed striking Hezbollah targets.
Israeli troops on Sunday raided Al Jazeera’s office in Ramallah in the West Bank, the network said. The news outlet’s journalists were ordered to leave the premises and told that their office would be shut. In May, Israeli officials ordered Al Jazeera to shut down operations in Israel.
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Magen David Adom, Israel’s main emergency medical organization, said its medics had treated a man, around age 60, who had been “lightly scratched” by a small piece of shrapnel. The group said in a statement that it had also treated several people who had been injured while running to air raid shelters or who suffered anxiety during the recent barrage.
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Hezbollah said in a statement that it had targeted the Ramat David air base, southeast of the northern Israeli city of Haifa, with dozens of missiles. The barrage was a response to Israeli strikes in Lebanon which had caused civilian deaths, the group said.
The skies above northern Israel have now been calm for more than 45 minutes, following the barrage of rockets fired unusually deep into Israel at around 1:10 a.m. local time. The Israeli military has announced that one rocket evaded Israel’s air defense missiles. Kan, the Israeli national broadcaster, said that one person was lightly injured.
The Israeli military said roughly 10 rockets crossed into Israel from Lebanon as part of the volley toward communities in northern Israel. Most were intercepted by Israel’s aerial defense, the military said.
The recent rockets from Lebanon were fired deep into Israel, but they may have avoided three of the most populated cities in northern Israel, Haifa, Nahariya and Tiberias. The military’s alert system has not reported rocket fire over those three cities.
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Two deadly bombings in Beirut, Lebanon, that killed scores of U.S. military personnel more than 40 years ago have cast a long shadow over survivors and victims’ families.
A day after the killing of a senior Hezbollah member seen as a key figure in those attacks, many of those Americans welcomed the news but said it stirred painful memories without resolving the past.
“It doesn’t bring closure,” said Michael Harris, 59, a Marine veteran who was “blown out” of his barracks in one of the attacks and lives today in Rhode Island. “It wasn’t just one person responsible.”
The senior Hezbollah commander Ibrahim Aqeel was killed on Friday after Israeli fighter jets bombed a heavily residential area of Beirut’s southern suburbs. Mr. Aqeel has been long been wanted by the United States for his role in two 1983 bombings in Beirut that killed over 350 people, most of them U.S. service members. The United States had placed a multimillion-dollar bounty on his head, but he had survived multiple assassination attempts.
The first attack, a bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in April 1983, killed 63 people, including 17 Americans. Six months later, a suicide bomber drove a truck packed with explosives into the U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Beirut, killing more than 300 people, including 241 American service members.
For many survivors and victims’ loved ones, those bombings never go away.
Every time Mr. Harris picks up the paper or watches the news about another bombing, he said, “it opens up wounds.”
Elisa Camara, 58, of Daytona Beach Shores, Fla., said Mr. Aqeel’s death brought back hard memories of her brother, Mecot Camara, who was one of the Marines killed in the October bombing. Her voice broke as she described him as a kindhearted man who “never had an enemy” and cherished hunting, fishing and spending time with his family.
Like many families, she said, she never experienced the sense of resolution of the killings through the legal system, so Mr. Aqeel’s death offered a measure of finality — at least regarding one of those involved.
“Justice is served,” she said. “That’s one less evil person in the world.”
Still, she added, more must be done to combat terrorism so that more people do not lose their loved ones.
Valerie Giblin, 61, of Smithfield, R.I., shared a similar sense of unresolved grief. Her husband, Timothy Giblin, died in the barracks attack when their daughter was 2 years old.
“I was 20 years old,” she said. “I never remarried. I’ll be his wife until the day I die.”
When Mrs. Giblin heard the news from friends and family, she said her reaction was, “It’s about time.” After all these years, she added, little has been done to hold those responsible accountable.
Lisa Weide, 62, of Daytona Beach, Fla., who lost her brother, Brett Croft, in the barracks attack just three days before his 21st birthday, shared a similar sentiment about Mr. Aqeel.
“As cruel as it may sound, I’m glad he’s dead,” she said.
However, Mrs. Weide said, she found her own closure years ago. A few months after Mr. Croft’s death, she said she had a dream so vivid that she was convinced it was him.
In the dream, Mr. Croft appeared in his favorite shirt — the black button-down he always had her iron for him before going out — and invited her on a walk. They eventually stopped, and he told her, “I have to go now.”
Before he left, she asked, “Did you suffer?”
“We locked eyes,” she recounted, choking up. “And he said, ‘No.’”
“That really helped me,” she said. “I don’t walk around dwelling on it. I felt at peace.”
Sheelagh McNeill and Jack Begg contributed research.
Israel’s military alert system has just warned of rockets in the skies above roughly 70 towns in northern Israel. Some of the towns are more than 30 miles south of the Israel-Lebanon border, which would make this the farthest militants in Lebanon have fired into Israel since the start of the conflict in October.
The Israeli military said that it had struck around 400 targets across southern Lebanon since Saturday afternoon, following an additional wave of attacks. The bombardment represented a significant uptick.
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Dr. Dania El-Hallak was already exhausted. After wireless devices exploded across Lebanon, there had been little time to process what she had seen — the hundreds of wounded, many of their faces disfigured beyond recognition.
“I am hoping that it was all just a bad dream,” Dr. El-Hallak said, still struggling to take stock of the carnage on Friday.
Then, without warning, Israeli fighter jets ripped through the skies above Lebanon’s capital.
“There are strikes in Dahiya?” she said in disbelief, using the Arabic name for Beirut’s southern suburbs.
Her nightmare had only just begun.
The attacks on Hezbollah’s communication devices this week — widely attributed to Israel — wounded thousands of people, leaving many of them permanently disabled and in need of long-term rehabilitative care. The Israeli airstrike just miles from downtown Beirut on Friday, which killed at least 37 people and injured dozens more, has only added to the toll. Others are still presumed trapped in the debris.
Lebanon’s ailing health system — already embattled by a crippling economic collapse — has been sent into overdrive.
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“The sense is that war is inevitable, especially after yesterday’s air raid,” said Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta, the chief reconstructive surgeon at the American University of Beirut Medical Center.
Last year, Dr. Abu Sitta spent 43 days volunteering in Gaza at Shifa hospital’s burn treatment unit. When the Israeli airstrike hit on Friday as he was still operating on those wounded in the wireless device attacks, he said it felt like he was suddenly back in the besieged Palestinian enclave.
“We are stuck in this loop,” Dr. Abu Sitta said. “You just operate and operate. You feel like you are playing catch up all the time.”
For 11 months, Hezbollah has been firing into northern Israel in support of Hamas in Gaza. Israel has responded by bombarding Lebanon and assassinating the Hezbollah’s leaders. More than 160,000 civilians have fled areas on both sides of the border. The violence seen in recent days, however, has represented a significant escalation in the conflict, fueling fears that Israel is beckoning all-out war.
The sudden brutality of the wireless device attacks this week, which saw pagers and hand-held radios detonate without warning, have shocked even the most hardened of Lebanese doctors. Eyes blown out of their sockets. Faces torn to pieces by burning shards of plastic. Hands and fingers so mangled that doctors had no choice but to amputate them.
Many of the victims — among them women and children — would never see again, doctors said.
“This attack was literally directed at the eyes,” said Dr. Pierre Mardelli, a veteran eye doctor who answered the call for volunteers this week when news broke of the first wave of explosions on Tuesday.
His patients said they had received an error message on their pagers, prompting them to try to fix the problem. Then the devices exploded in their hands. It appeared to be one of the key factors that accounted for so many people being blinded.
“People did not even have time to blink,” he said.
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With hospitals swamped by the influx of patients, Dr. Mardelli said he was forced for the first time in his 27-year career to suture eye wounds without anesthesia.
“It was an indiscriminate attack,” Firass Abiad, Lebanon’s health minister, told reporters on Thursday, describing the burden the attacks had put on Lebanon’s health system. “It was a war crime.”
Mr. Abiad has pledged to pay for the long-term care of those injured, but Lebanese remain skeptical of any promises by the country’s ailing government. Despite assurances, the health system itself would most likely be unable to cope in the event of an all-out conflict, doctors said.
“The Lebanese health system is in no way able to treat war wounded if it were to escalate into a full-blown war,” Dr. Abu Sitta said.
The rehabilitation process, doctors said, would be a long and difficult road for hundreds if not thousands of people.
Dr. Antoine Abi Abboud, who leads the plastic and reconstructive surgery unit at Beirut’s Mount Lebanon hospital, estimated that at least 40 percent of those wounded in the wave of wireless device attacks had been left permanently disabled.
The hospital had received some of the most severe cases on Tuesday because of its proximity to Beirut’s southern suburbs, where the bulk of the pager detonations took place. Dr. Abi Abboud said most of the people he treated had lost one or both of their eyes.
“It was savage,” he said.
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I attended a funeral for three Hezbollah members in southern Beirut on Saturday, where you could feel a mix of sorrow and defiance among the mourners after a deadly and chaotic week for the militant group.
The coffins, draped in Hezbollah’s yellow and green flag, were carried by a procession of men chanting Shiite religious and pro-Hezbollah slogans, while the audio of a speech by Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, played in the background. Mr. Nasrallah has vowed retribution against Israel for a week of attacks that included exploding wireless devices, which killed dozens and maimed thousands, and an airstrike that targeted a meeting of Hezbollah commanders.
Hezbollah members I spoke to said they are eagerly awaiting orders from Mr. Nasrallah, and the group’s regional patron, Iran, as to how — or whether — to respond to Israel’s latest attacks. Everyone I spoke to refused to give me their full names for fear of reprisals.
But some reflected an ambivalence over what that response should be: One told me he hoped Mr. Nasrallah would order a fierce retaliation. Others said that idea gave them pause. After being dealt heavy blows, they said the group needed time to recover and prepare a response that was substantive and not merely symbolic.
Ahmad, who gave me his first name, was holding Hezbollah’s flag and said he was ready to fight, but also that he would wait to receive orders.
No matter their positions, everyone at the funeral expressed continued loyalty to Mr. Nasrallah and faith in his decisions at a time when many other Lebanese have expressed shock at how deeply Israeli intelligence appeared to had penetrated Hezbollah.
Even after Israel’s string of attacks this week, Hezbollah has continued its daily bombardment of northern Israel, which it has vowed to continue until Israel reaches a cease-fire with Hamas to end the war in the Gaza Strip.
In a symbolic gesture of their continued support of the Palestinian cause, some mourners at the funeral draped the black-and-white checkered Palestinian scarf, known as the kaffiyeh, over their shoulders.
