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Israel’s government said a drone targeted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s house on Saturday, with no casualties, as fighting with Lebanon-based Hezbollah and Gaza-based Hamas showed no pause after the killing of the mastermind of last year’s deadly October 7 attack.
Israel’s military said dozens of projectiles were launched from Lebanon, as sirens wailed.
Netanyahu’s office said the drone targeted his house in the Mediterranean coastal town of Caesarea, though neither he nor his wife were there.
Hezbollah did not claim responsibility for the drone attack but said it carried out several rocket attacks on northern and central Israel.
The barrage came as Israel is expected to respond to an Iranian attack earlier this month.
Israel in turn carried out at least three airstrikes on Beirut’s southern suburbs known as Dahiyeh, a heavily populated area home to Hezbollah’s offices. Israel’s military said it was looking into the reported strikes.
In Gaza, Israeli forces fired at hospitals in the battered north of the Palestinian enclave, and strikes killed more than 50 people, including children, in less than 24 hours, according to hospital officials and an Associated Press reporter there.
“The possibility of war in the region remains a serious concern,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said while visiting Turkey.
Barrages from Lebanon target northern Israel
Israel’s war with Lebanon’s Hezbollah — a Hamas ally backed by Iran — has intensified.
Hezbollah said Friday it planned to launch a new phase of fighting by sending more guided missiles and exploding drones into Israel.
The militant group’s longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was killed in an Israeli airstrike in September, and Israel sent ground troops into Lebanon early this month.
Israel’s military on Saturday said some 180 projectiles were fired from Lebanon. A 50-year-old man was killed after being hit by shrapnel while sitting in his car in northern Israel, and four people were injured, Israel’s medical services said.
In the northern city of Kiryat Ata, one rocket landed and Associated Press reporters saw burned cars and a damaged building.
Itzik Billet, commander for the Haifa area, said nine people were lightly injured. The Israeli fire service said it was battling several blazes from missiles in the Shlomi area next to the Lebanese border.
Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency said an Israeli airstrike on an apartment in Baaloul village in the east killed five people, including the mayor of a nearby village, Sohmor. Israel’s military said it was looking into reports of a strike on a building in the eastern Bekaa valley.
Lebanon’s health ministry said an Israeli airstrike hit a vehicle on a highway north of Beirut, killing two people.
Israel has issued near-daily warnings for people to leave buildings and villages in parts of Lebanon. The fighting has displaced more than one million people, including some 400,000 children.
Israel also said Saturday it killed Hezbollah’s deputy commander in the southern town of Bint Jbeil. The army said Nasser Rashid supervised attacks against Israel.
Israeli strikes pound Gaza as Hamas rejects hostage release
Both Israel and Hamas have signalled resistance to ending the war in Gaza after the killing of Hamas’ leader Yahya Sinwar, was the chief architect of the Hamas raid on Israel a year ago that killed some 1200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapped another 250.
On Friday, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said Sinwar’s death was a painful loss but declared that “Hamas is alive and will stay alive.”
Hamas has reiterated its stance that the hostages taken from Israel a year ago will not be released until there is a cease-fire in Gaza and Israeli troops withdraw.
Netanyahu says Israel’s military will keep fighting until the hostages are released, and will remain in Gaza to prevent a severely weakened Hamas from rearming.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive in Gaza has killed over 42,000 Palestinians, according to local health authorities, who do not distinguish combatants from civilians but say more than half the dead are women and children.
More strikes pounded Gaza on Saturday. The strikes knocked out internet networks in northern Gaza, Paltel, the Palestinian communications company, said on Facebook.
The Palestinian Health Ministry said Israeli strikes hit the upper floors of the Indonesian Hospital in Beit Lahiya, and forces opened fire at the hospital’s building and courtyard, causing panic. At Al-Awda hospital in Jabaliya, in northern Gaza, strikes hit the building’s top floors, injuring several staff members, the hospital said.
Three houses in Jabaliya were struck overnight on Friday, killing at least 30 people, more than half of them women and children, said Fares Abu Hamza, head of the health ministry’s ambulance and emergency service. At least 80 people were injured.
In central Gaza, at least 10 people were killed, including two children, when a house was hit in the town of Zawayda, according to the al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah. Another strike killed 11 people, all from the same family, in the Maghazi refugee camp, the hospital said. Associated Press journalists counted the bodies from both strikes.
A United Nations school sheltering displaced people in the west of Gaza City, was also hit, killing several people, according to the Hamas-run civil defense first responders.
The war has destroyed vast swaths of Gaza, displaced about 90 per cent of its population of 2.3 million people, and left them struggling to find food, water, medicine and fuel.
Some see hope after Sinwar’s death
Sinwar’s killing could shift the dynamics of the war in Gaza, while Israel presses its offensive against Hezbollah with ground troops in southern Lebanon and airstrikes in other areas of the country.
Israel’s allies and exhausted Gaza residents expressed hope that Sinwar’s death would pave the way for an end to the fighting.
In Israel, families of hostages still held in Gaza demanded the Israeli government use Sinwar’s killing as a way to restart negotiations to bring home their loved ones. About 100 hostages remain in Gaza, at least 30 of whom Israel says are dead.
Israel has pledged to destroy Hamas politically in Gaza, and killing Sinwar was a top military priority. But Netanyahu said in announcing the killing that “our war is not yet ended.”
