Hezbollah has fired more than 100 rockets into northern Israel, with some rockets hitting the suburbs of Haifa.
The overnight attack set off air sirens across northern Israel, forcing thousands of people into bomb shelters.
The Israeli military has claimed that Hezbollah had deliberately fired the rockets at civilian areas.
Israel’s Magen David Adom rescue service said that it had treated four people for shrapnel wounds, including a 76-year-old man who was injured in Kiryat Bialik, a community near Haifa where where cars were set on fire and buildings were damaged.
On Friday Israel carried out air strikes on Beirut, which killed at least 37 people, including one of Hezbollah’s top leaders as well as women and children.
Tensions between the two sides have escalated significantly following a sophisticated attack that caused a number of devices belonging to Hezbollah, including pagers and walkie-talkies, to explode on Tuesday and Wednesday.
(Picture: REUTERS)
At least 37 people died as a result of the explosions, including two children, and around 3,000 people were injured.
has vowed to retaliate against Israel for the pager explosions. The attacks were widely blamed on Israel, which has not confirmed or denied responsibility.
The Israeli military said it carried out a number of strikes across southern Lebanon over the past 24 hours, hitting some 400 militant sites, including rocket launchers.
Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani, an Israeli military spokesman, said those strikes had thwarted an even larger attack.
‘Hundreds of thousands of civilians have come under fire across a lot of northern Israel. They spent the night and now the morning in bomb shelters. Today we saw fire that was deeper into Israel than before.’
In a separate development, Israeli forces raided the West Bank bureau of Al-Jazeera, which it had banned earlier this year, accusing it of serving as a mouthpiece for militant groups.
The broadcaster has denied these allegations.
Israel and Hezbollah have traded fire since the outbreak of the war in Gaza nearly a year ago, following the October 7 Hamas-led attack that killed more than 1,000 Israelis.
250 people were taken hostage, and 100 remain in captivity in Gaza.
The Ministry of Health in Gaza estimates that over 41,000 Gazans have been killed since October 7.
Hezbollah began firing rockets in solidarity with the Palestinians and its fellow Iran-backed ally Hamas.
The low-level fighting has killed dozens of people in Israel, hundreds in Lebanon, and displaced tens of thousands on both sides of the frontier.
Neither side is believed to be seeking a war. But in recent weeks, Israel has shifted its focus from Gaza to Lebanon and vowed to bring back calm to the border so that Israelis can return to their homes in the north.
Hezbollah has said it will only halt its attacks if there is a ceasefire in Gaza, which appears increasingly elusive as long-running talks led by the United States, Egypt and Qatar have so far failed.
Israeli media reported that rockets fired from Lebanon early on Sunday were intercepted in the areas of Haifa and Nazareth, which are further south than most of the rocket fire to date. Israel cancelled school across the north of the country.
On Friday, an Israeli air strike destroyed an eight-storey building in Beirut’s southern suburbs as Hezbollah members were meeting in the basement, according to Israel.
Ibrahim Akil, a top Hezbollah official who commanded the group’s special forces unit, known as the Radwan Force, was killed in the strike.
Lebanon’s health minister, Firass Abiad, told reporters on Saturday that at least seven women and three children were killed in Friday’s air strike on the building. He said another 68 people were injured, including 15 who were taken to hospital.
It was the deadliest strike on Beirut since the bruising month-long war in 2006 between Israel and Hezbollah, and the casualty count could grow, with 23 people still missing, a government official said.
Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant said the attack broke up the group’s chain of command while taking out Akil, who he said was responsible for Israeli deaths.
Akil had been on the US most wanted list for years, with a seven million dollar (£5.2 million) reward, over his alleged role in the 1983 bombing of the US embassy in Beirut and the taking of American and German hostages in Lebanon during the civil war in the 1980s.
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