Hezbollah drone strike hits key Israeli military command centre

 
The Iran-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and Israel edged closer towards full scale war on Tuesday, as the group launched explosive drones at a key Israeli command base, declaring the attack part of its response to recent high-level Israeli assassinations in Lebanon.

Hezbollah announced it launched "a number of explosive attack drones" at the Israeli northern military command base in Safed, the first time it has targeted the site, the Guardian reports.

As Israel and Hezbollah exchanged fire throughout the day, Lebanon's caretaker prime minister Najib Makiti said that while his country was open to negotiations, it was being threatened with war.

"We seek permanent stability and call for a lasting peaceful solution," said Makiti, "but in return we receive warnings through international envoys about a war on Lebanon," he added, in reference to reported threats from Israel passed through foreign diplomats. "The position I repeat to these delegates is: Do you support the idea of destruction? Is what is happening in Gaza acceptable?"

Hezbollah cited the killing of the senior Hezbollah figure Wissam al-Tawil on Monday and Hamas deputy chief Saleh al-Arouri, last week, in its statement about the strike on the Safed base.

Hezbollah said later it also attacked at least six Israeli posts along the border on Tuesday. Israeli media reports and video footage posted on social media confirmed that at least one drone had landed inside the area of the base. Hezbollah announced that several had been launched. The drone appeared to have landed in an open area of the base close to a car park, with smoke from the explosion visible in some footage.

The Israeli army confirmed that a "hostile aircraft" had come down at one of its bases in the north and said that "no injuries or damage were reported".
The border violence has forced tens of thousands of people to flee on both sides and raised fears the conflict could spiral.

Israel has said it is giving a chance for diplomacy to prevent Hezbollah firing on people living in its north and to push Hezbollah back from the border, warning that the Israeli army will otherwise take action to achieve these aims.

However Israel has launched a series of highly provocative attacks against targets in Lebanon in the past week including the high profile assassination of Arouri, the first strike on the Lebanese capital Beirut since 2006.

As air raid sirens sounded across northern Israel on Tuesday, Israeli aircraft, drones and artillery struck multiple targets inside southern Lebanon, including a strike on a car during the funeral of a senior commander in the group's elite Radwan force who had been killed the day before.

According to reports, the individual killed at the funeral was Ali Hussein Barji, the commander of Hezbollah's aerial forces in southern Lebanon. Israeli media said he had directed the Safed attack.

The killing took place as hundreds of Hezbollah supporters attended Tawil's funeral procession, the group's yellow flag draped over his coffin.
Tawil was regarded as an important figure in Hezbollah, involved in the abduction of Israeli soldiers which triggered the group's last war with Israel in 2006 as well as high-calibre operations in Syria.

He had also "directed numerous operations" against Israeli forces since the Gaza war began, Hezbollah said.
The escalating violence came as the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, tours the Middle East in an attempt to prevent the war between Israel and Hamas from spreading regionally.

In a pointed warning, the Hezbollah deputy leader, Naim Qassem, said in a televised speech on Tuesday that his group did not want to expand the war from Lebanon, "but if Israel expands [it], the response is inevitable to the maximum extent required to deter Israel".

Qassem added that Israel's wave of targeted killings "cannot lead to a phase of retreat but rather to a push forward for the resistance".
Earlier on Tuesday , an Israeli drone strike hit a car in southern Lebanon, some ten kilomtres from the border, killing three people inside it, security officials in the area and the state news agency said. Sources did not immediately identify those killed.

The Safed strike was the second to hit a significant Israeli military location in recent days, after an attack on the Mount Meron airbase on Saturday, which caused significant damage.

A sharp escalation of violence between Israel and Hezbollah is fuelling fears that Israel's war with Hamas in Gaza is in danger of spreading across the region.

Tuesday's attacks, included several relatively far from from the immediate border area have underlined the rising tensions along the frontier since Hezbollah started attacking Israeli military posts a day after the deadly October 7 assault on southern Israel by the Palestinian militant group Hamas.
Hezbollah has said by keeping Israel's northern front active, it is helping to reduce pressure on Hamas in Gaza.