Lebanon’s Hezbollah group fired heavy rocket barrages at Israel on Sunday, with Israeli media reporting that a building had been hit near Tel Aviv, after a powerful Israeli airstrike killed at least 29 people in Beirut the day before.
Israel also struck Beirut’s Hezbollah-controlled southern suburbs, where intensified bombardment over the last two weeks has coincided with signs of progress in US-led ceasefire talks.
Police said there were multiple impact sites in the area of Petah Tikvah, on the eastern side of Tel Aviv, and that several people had minor injuries. Television footage showed an apartment damaged by rocket fire in Petah Tikvah, and video from the medical service MDA showed cars burning.
The Israeli military said Hezbollah had fired 170 rockets at Israel on Sunday, of which many were intercepted. At least four people had been injured by shrapnel.
Video obtained by Reuters showed a projectile exploding as it smashed into the roof of a building in the northern Israeli city of Nahariya.
The military warned on social media that it planned to target Hezbollah facilities in southern Beirut before strikes which security sources in Lebanon said demolished two apartment blocks. Afterwards, the it said it had hit command centers “deliberately embedded between civilian buildings.”
On Saturday, the Israeli military had carried out one of its deadliest and most powerful strikes on the center of Beirut.
Lebanon’s health ministry on Sunday raised the death toll from 20 to 29. It said 84 people had been killed in all on Saturday, taking the death toll to 3,754 since October 2023.
The Israeli military did not comment on Saturday’s strike in the capital or say what it had attacked.
Israel went on the offensive against the Iran-backed Hezbollah in September, pounding the south, the Bekaa Valley and Beirut’s southern suburbs with airstrikes after nearly a year of hostilities ignited by the Gaza war.
