By Steven Scheer and Yomna Ehab
JERUSALEM/CAIRO (Reuters) – Hezbollah rockets hit Israel’s third-largest city of Haifa, police said early on Monday, and Iraeli media reported 10 injured in the country’s north on the first anniversary of the Gaza war, which has spread in the Middle East.
Iran-backed Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas, the Palestinian militants group fighting Israel in Gaza, said it targeted a military base south of Haifa with a salvo of “Fadi 1” missiles.
Media said two rockets hit Haifa on Israel’s Mediterranean coast and five hit Tiberias, 65 km (40 miles) away.
Police said some buildings and properties were damaged, and there were reports of minor injuries, with some people taken to a nearby hospital.
Israel’s military said fighter jets hit targets belonging to Hezbollah’s Intelligence Headquarters in Beirut, including intelligence-gathering means, command centres, and additional infrastructure sites.
Over the past few hours, the airstrikes struck Hezbollah weapons storage facilities in the area of Beirut, the military said, adding that secondary explosions were identified after the strikes, indicating the presence of weaponry.
Airstrikes also hit Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon and the Beqaa area, including weapons storage facilities, infrastructure sites, a command centre, and a launcher, the military said.
It blamed Hezbollah for deliberately embedding its command centres and weaponry beneath residential buildings in the heart of Beirut and endangering the civilian population.
On Monday, Israelis marked the first anniversary of the devastating Hamas attack that triggered a war which has sparked protest worldwide and risks igniting a far wider conflict in the Middle East.
Ceremonies and protests in Jerusalem and Israel’s south were set to begin around 06:29 a.m., the hour when Hamas-led militants launched rockets into Israel at the start of the Oct. 7 attack last year.
They killed some 1,200 people and took about 250 hostages to Gaza, according to Israeli figures.
Hamas provoked an Israeli offensive in Gaza that laid waste the densely populated coastal enclave and killed almost 42,000 people, Palestinian health authorities say.
Security forces were on high alert across Israel on Monday, the military and police said, anticipating possible Palestinian attacks planned for the anniversary of Oct. 7, 2023, when the worst bloodletting in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict began.
For Israel, the surprise assault by the Palestinian Islamist group, also an ally of Iran, was one of the worst security failures for a country that prides itself on a strong, sophisticated military.
The Hamas attack on Israeli communities around Gaza and Israel’s relentless campaign in response have destabilised the Middle East while the scale of the killing and destruction have horrified people worldwide.
Israel has dealt major blows to Hamas and Hezbollah with a series of assassinations of its leaders and commanders, – part of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” that also includes Yemen’s Houthis and armed groups in Iraq to fight Israel and U.S. interests in the Middle East.
Iran’s Quds Force commander Esmail Qaani, who travelled to Lebanon after last month’s killing of Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah in an Israeli airstrike, has not been heard from since strikes on Beirut late last week, two senior Iranian security officials told Reuters.
One of the officials said Qaani was in Beirut’s southern suburbs, known as the Dahiyeh, during a strike reported to have targeted senior Hezbollah official Hashem Safieddine, but the official said he was not meeting Safieddine.
The Quds Force, the overseas arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, supervises dealings with militias allied with Tehran across the Middle East, such as Hezbollah.
Iranian Revolutionary Guards commander Brigadier General Abbas Nilforoushan was killed with Nasrallah in his bunker when it was hit on Sept. 27 by Israeli bombs.
The focus of the war has increasingly shifted north to Lebanon where Israeli forces have been exchanging fire with Hezbollah since the Iranian-backed group launched a barrage of missiles in support of Hamas on Oct. 8.
What began as limited daily exchanges has escalated into bombardments of Hezbollah’s stronghold in Beirut and a ground offensive into border villages meant to stamp out its fighters there and allow tens of thousands of Israelis evacuated from their homes in the country’s north to return.
Israel’s assault, which has killed well over 1,000 people in the past two weeks, has triggered a mass flight from southern Lebanon, where more than 1 million people have been displaced.
The escalation has raised fears that the United States and Iran will be sucked into a wider war in the oil-producing Middle East.
Iran launched a missile attack on Israel last week in response to its operations in Lebanon and Gaza, where Hezbollah and Hamas militants are Tehran’s allies in a so-called Axis of Resistance.
Israel, which says its objective is the safe return of tens of thousands of citizens to northern homes, vowed retaliation amid fears that tension would escalate into an all-out regional conflict that could also suck in the United States.
(Reporting by Steven Scheer and Yomna Ehab; Additional reporting by Monica Naime; Writing by Michael Georgy; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
