Israeli military says attacks serious, will have consequences. Four killed in shooting in Israel’s Jaffa, two attackers ‘neutralised’. Khamenei remains in secure location after missile attack n Israeli airstrikes kill 37 in Gaza. Israel begins ground offensive in Lebanon.
JERUSALEM/BEIRUT/Gaza - Iran fired a salvo of ballistic missiles at Israel on Tuesday in retaliation for Israel’s campaign against Tehran’s Hezbollah allies in Lebanon.
Alarms sounded across Israel and explosions could be heard in Jerusalem and the Jordan River valley after Israelis piled into bomb shelters. Reporters on state television lay flat on the ground during live broadcasts.
Israeli army radio said nearly 200 missiles had been launched into Israel from Iran. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said Iran had launched tens of missiles at Israel, and that if Israel retaliated Tehran’s response would be “more crushing and ruinous”.
Israel’s military later sounded the all-clear and said Israelis were free to leave their shelters. Military spokesman Daniel Hagari said the military was not aware of any injuries resulting from the Iranian missile attacks.
He described the attack as serious and said it would have consequences. A senior Iranian official told wire service the order to launch missiles at Israel had been made by the country’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Khamenei remains in a secure location, the senior official added. Journalists saw missiles intercepted in the airspace of neighbouring Jordan.
Oil prices shot up five percent on the news of the Iranian missile strikes, which raise the prospect of a wider war between the two arch enemies.
A previous round of Iranian missiles fired at Israel in April - the first ever - were shot down with the help of the U.S. military and other allies. Israel responded at the time with airstrikes in Iran, but wider escalation was averted.
Iran has vowed to retaliate following Israeli strikes that killed the top leadership of its ally Hezbollah in Lebanon, including that group’s leader Hassan Nasrallah, a towering figure in Iran’s network of fighters across the region.
Israel said its troops had launched ground raids into Lebanon, though it described the forays as limited.
In Washington, U.S. President Joe Biden said the United States was prepared to help Israel defend itself from Iranian missile attacks.
“We discussed how the United States is prepared to help Israel defend against these attacks, and protect American personnel in the region,” Biden said on X about a meeting held with Vice President Kamala Harris and the White House national security team earlier in the day.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, speaking after Iran fired its salvo of missiles at Israel, condemned what he called “escalation after escalation”, saying: “This must stop. We absolutely need a ceasefire.”
Though so far characterised by Israel as limited, a ground campaign into Lebanon for the first time in 18 years pitting Israeli soldiers against Hezbollah, Iran’s best-armed proxy force in the Middle East, would be a major regional escalation.
More than a thousand Lebanese have been killed and a million have fled their homes in weeks of intense Israeli airstrikes.
In the latest announced killing of a senior Hezbollah figure, Israel said on Tuesday it had assassinated a commander named Muhammad Jaafar Qasir, describing him as in charge of weapons transfers from Iran and its affiliates.
Near the city of Sidon along the Mediterranean south of Beirut, mourners wept over coffins containing black-shrouded bodies of people killed in Israeli strikes.
“The building got struck down and I couldn’t protect my daughter or anyone else. Thank God, my son and I got out, but I lost my daughter and wife, I lost my home, I have become homeless. What do you want me to say? My whole life changed in a second,” said resident Abdulhamid Ramadan.
Many Lebanese said they were ready to resist Israeli forces.
“Not just Hezbollah, all of Lebanon will fight this time. All of Lebanon is determined to fight Israel for the massacres it committed in Gaza and Lebanon,” said Abu Alaa, a Sidon resident.
In Beirut, Israel struck a high-rise building in the central Jnah area and one in the capital’s southern suburbs that briefly closed the road to Beirut airport. The Israeli military said it had carried out a “precise strike”.
Israel has long said it would do whatever it takes to secure its northern border and let tens of thousands of Israelis return to towns they fled since the outbreak of war in Gaza a year ago, when Hezbollah began firing across the frontier in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.
An Israeli security official said troops in southern Lebanon had begun limited raids into Lebanon overnight that only went a short distance over the border, adding that no direct clashes with Hezbollah fighters were reported. The military said similar such raids had in fact been taking place in recent months.
But in a clear sign that the war could expand further, the military said it was calling up four additional reserve brigades for operational missions on the northern border.
Israel has a history of fighting in Lebanon, which it invaded in 1982 in the midst of Lebanon’s own sectarian civil war. Israeli troops finally pulled out in 2000 but returned to fight another major war against Hezbollah in 2006. Since then, the border “blue line” has been monitored by the U.N.
The United Nations said its peacekeepers had seen sporadic Israeli incursions but had not seen a full-scale invasion.
Hezbollah, a Shi’ite militia formed by Iran to resist Israeli forces in Lebanon, has evolved into Lebanon’s most powerful armed force, equipped with an arsenal of missiles and rockets. It is also Lebanon’s strongest political party, and sits at the forefront of a network of Iranian-backed armed movements across the Middle East.
Four people were killed and seven wounded in a shooting attack in the Jaffa neighbourhood of Tel Aviv on Tuesday, Israeli police said in a statement.
They said the two shooters had been “neutralised” and the situation was “under control”. The families of the victims had been notified.
Meanwhile, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei remains in a secure location after Tehran fired missiles at Israel, a senior Iranian official told wire service on Tuesday.
He was moved to a secure location after Israel assassinated Iran’s close ally Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah last week.
Israeli airstrikes killed at least 37 people in Gaza on Tuesday, local medics said and fighting ramped up, as the Israeli military said it had been targeting command centres used by its Islamist militant foe Hamas.
Palestinian health officials said at least 13 people, including women and children, were killed in two Israeli strikes on two houses in Nuseirat, one of the enclave’s eight historic refugee camps.
There has been no immediate comment by the Israeli army on the two strikes.
Another strike on a school sheltering displaced Palestinian families in the Tuffah neighbourhood of Gaza City killed at least seven people, medics added.
The Israeli military said in a statement the air strike targeted Hamas militants operating from a command centre embedded in a compound that had previously served as Al-Shejaia School.
It accused Hamas of using the civilian population and facilities for military purposes, which Hamas denies.
Later on Tuesday, two separate Israeli attacks killed five Palestinians in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip and in the Zeitoun suburb of Gaza City, medics said.
In Khan Younis, in the south of the enclave, six Palestinians were killed in an Israeli air strike on a tent housing displaced people, medics said.
Hours later, an Israeli airstrike on a car in western Khan Younis, killed six Palestinians, medics said. Footage circulated on social media, showed a mangled, burnt-out vehicle.
The armed wings of Hamas, the Islamic Jihad, and other smaller militant factions said in separate statements that their fighters attacked Israeli forces operating in several areas of Gaza with anti-tank rockets, mortar fire, and explosive devices.
The renewed surge in violence in Gaza comes as Israel began a ground operation in Lebanon, saying its paratroopers and commandos were engaged in intense fighting with Iran-backed Hezbollah. The conflict follows devastating Israeli airstrikes against Hezbollah’s leadership.
The operation into Lebanon represents an escalation of the conflict in the Middle East between Israel and Iran-backed militants that threatens to suck in the U.S. and Iran.
Hezbollah began firing rockets into Israel almost a year ago, in support of its ally Hamas in the war in Gaza, which began after the militant group staged the deadliest assault in Israel’s history on Oct. 7.
The assault, in which Israel says 1,200 people were killed and more than 250 taken hostage, triggered the war that has devastated Gaza, displacing most of its 2.3 million population and killing more than 41,600 people, according to Gaza health authorities.
Some Palestinians said they feared that Israel’s shift in focus to Lebanon could prolong the conflict in Gaza, which marks its first anniversary next week.
“The eyes of the world now are on Lebanon while the occupation continues its killing in Gaza. We are afraid the war is going to go on for more months at least,” said Samir Mohammed, 46, a father of five from Gaza City.
“It is all unclear now as Israel unleashes its force undeterred in Gaza, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, and God knows where else in the future,” he told wire serivce via a chat app.