JERUSALEM/BEIRUT, Oct 7 (Reuters) – Hezbollah fired rockets at Israel’s third largest city Haifa on Monday as Israeli forces looked poised to expand ground raids into south Lebanon on the first anniversary of the Gaza war, which has spread conflict across the Middle East.
Iran-backed Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas, the Palestinian militant group fighting Israel in Gaza, said it targeted a military base south of Haifa with “Fadi 1” missiles and launched another strike on Tiberias, 65 km (40 miles) away.
Hezbollah said it targeted areas north of Haifa in a second salvo of missiles later in the day. Israel’s military said around 135 projectiles had entered Israeli territory on Monday as of 5 p.m. (1400 GMT). Ten people were reported injured in the Haifa area and two others further south in central Israel.
The military said the air force was carrying out extensive bombings of Hezbollah targets in south Lebanon, and that two Israeli soldiers were killed in border-area combat, taking the military death toll inside Lebanon so far to 11.
It said it also carried out a targeted strike in Beirut’s southern suburbs, where a thick plume of smoke could be seen.
Lebanon’s health ministry said 10 firefighters were killed in an Israeli airstrike on a municipal building in the border-area town of Bint Jbeil, and that other aerial attacks on Sunday killed 22 people in a swathe of southern and eastern towns.
The spiralling conflict has raised concerns that the United States, Israel’s superpower ally, and Iran will be sucked into a wider war in the oil-producing Middle East.
Hezbollah fired off a missile salvo towards a military base south of the city on Israel’s western coast, followed by a second one that it said targeted an area north of the city.
The Israeli military said it intercepted five rockets fired from Lebanon and was reviewing the incident. It also downed some of the 15 projectiles it said were fired towards Tiberias, around 40 miles east of Haifa near the Golan Heights.
Meanwhile, Israel fired missiles at the southern suburbs of Beirut, the Lebanese capital where Hezbollah is headquartered. For more than two weeks, Israel has launched a wave of aerial attacks at the city, killing more than 1,500 people.
The rockets across the Israel-Lebanon border came hours before the 1-year anniversary of Oct. 7, when Hamas overran Gaza’s border, killing 1,200 Israelis and taking 251 people hostage, marking the largest escalation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in decades. It was the biggest attack on Jews since the Holocaust and the deadliest day in Israel’s history.