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Hezbollah Missiles Hit Haifa, Israel Steps up Bombings in South Lebanon

Smoke billows near buildings, amid the ongoing hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, in Tyre, southern Lebanon, October 7, 2024. (Reuters)
Smoke billows near buildings, amid the ongoing hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, in Tyre, southern Lebanon, October 7, 2024. (Reuters)
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Hezbollah Missiles Hit Haifa, Israel Steps up Bombings in South Lebanon

Smoke billows near buildings, amid the ongoing hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, in Tyre, southern Lebanon, October 7, 2024. (Reuters)
Smoke billows near buildings, amid the ongoing hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, in Tyre, southern Lebanon, October 7, 2024. (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 armed 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 spiraling 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.

Iran launched a barrage of missiles at Israel on Oct. 1. Israel has said it will retaliate and is weighing its options. One possible target is Iran's oil facilities.

ROCKETS HIT HAIFA

An Israeli military statement said five rockets were launched towards Haifa, also a major Mediterranean port, from Lebanon and interceptors were fired at them. "Fallen projectiles were identified in the area. The incident is under review."

It said 15 other rockets were fired inland at Tiberias in Israel's northern Galilee region, some of which were shot down. Israel media said five more rockets hit the Tiberias area later.

Israel also intercepted two drones launched early on Monday from the east after sirens blared in the central areas of Rishon Lezion and Palmachim, the military said.

Hamas, which triggered the Gaza war with a surprise attack on Israel a year ago, meanwhile targeted Israel's commercial capital Tel Aviv with a missile salvo, the group said, setting off sirens in central areas of the country.

Many Israelis have regained confidence in their long-vaunted military and intelligence apparatus after a series of deadly blows to the command structure of Hezbollah, Iran's most formidable Middle East proxy force, in Lebanon in recent weeks.

"Our counterattack on our enemies in Iran's axis of evil is necessary for securing our future and ensuring our security," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at a special cabinet meeting in Jerusalem marking the Gaza war anniversary.

"We are changing the security reality in our region, for our children's sake, for our future, to ensure that what happened on Oct. 7 does not happen again," Netanyahu said.

Beirut's densely populated southern suburbs were again pounded by airstrikes overnight as Israel extended an aerial campaign on the area where Hezbollah has its headquarters.

Israel accuses the movement of deliberately embedding its command centers and weaponry beneath residential buildings in the heart of Beirut. Hezbollah denies storing weapons among civilians.

Israeli airstrikes have displaced 1.2 million people in Lebanon and as the bombing campaign intensifies, many are afraid their country will face the vast scale of destruction wrought on Gaza by Israel's air and ground onslaught there.

ISRAEL-HEZBOLLAH CONFLICT SPREADS

Hezbollah began launching rockets at Israel on Oct. 8, 2023 in solidarity with Hamas. After a year of exchanges of fire between Hezbollah and Israel mostly limited to the frontier region, the conflict has significantly escalated in Lebanon.

Israel has carried out ground incursions into Lebanon's Hezbollah-dominated south, which Hezbollah says it has repelled.

Israelis marked the first anniversary of the Hamas attack with ceremonies and protests on Monday including a memorial event for victims of the Nova Music Festival where militants killed 364 people and kidnapped 44 partygoers and staff.

In their attack through Israeli towns and kibbutz villages near the Gaza border a year ago, Hamas-led fighters killed some 1,200 people and took about 250 hostages back to Gaza, according to Israeli figures.

The huge security lapse led to the single deadliest day for Jews since the Nazi Holocaust, shattered many citizens' sense of security and sent their faith in its leaders to new lows.

The Hamas assault unleashed an Israeli offensive on Gaza that has largely flattened the densely populated enclave and killed almost 42,000 people, Palestinian health authorities say.

The Gaza war has given rise to a multi-front Middle East conflict, drawing in Iran's broader "Axis of Resistance" - Hezbollah, Yemen's Houthis, Iraqi militia groups - and sparking several rare, direct confrontations between Israel and Iran.

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Arab World

As Flooding Becomes a Yearly Disaster in South Sudan, Thousands Survive on the Edge of a Canal

Children ride in a small canoe around the area where they live in Jonglei state, South Sudan. (Photo: AP)
Children ride in a small canoe around the area where they live in Jonglei state, South Sudan. (Photo: AP)
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As Flooding Becomes a Yearly Disaster in South Sudan, Thousands Survive on the Edge of a Canal

Children ride in a small canoe around the area where they live in Jonglei state, South Sudan. (Photo: AP)
Children ride in a small canoe around the area where they live in Jonglei state, South Sudan. (Photo: AP)

Long-horned cattle wade through flooded lands and climb a slope along a canal that has become a refuge for displaced families in South Sudan. Smoke from burning dung rises near homes of mud and grass where thousands of people now live after floods swept away their village.
“Too much suffering,” said Bichiok Hoth Chuiny, a woman in her 70s. She supported herself with a stick as she walked in the newly established community of Pajiek in Jonglei state north of the capital, Juba, The Associated Press said.
For the first time in decades, the flooding had forced her to flee. Her efforts to protect her home by building dykes failed. Her former village of Gorwai is now a swamp.
“I had to be dragged in a canoe up to here,” Chuiny said. An AP journalist was the first to visit the community.
Such flooding is becoming a yearly disaster in South Sudan, which the World Bank has described as “the world’s most vulnerable country to climate change and also the one most lacking in coping capacity."
More than 379,000 people have been displaced by flooding this year, according to the UN humanitarian agency.
Seasonal flooding has long been part of the lifestyle of pastoral communities around the Sudd, the largest wetlands in Africa, in the Nile River floodplain. But since the 1960s the swamp has kept growing, submerging villages, ruining farmland and killing livestock.
“The Dinka, Nuer and Murle communities of Jonglei are losing the ability to keep cattle and do farming in that region the way they used to,” said Daniel Akech Thiong, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group.
South Sudan is poorly equipped to adjust. Independent since 2011, the country plunged into civil war in 2013. Despite a peace deal in 2018, the government has failed to address numerous crises. Some 2.4 million people remain internally displaced by conflict and flooding.
The latest overflowing of the Nile has been blamed on factors including the opening of dams upstream in Uganda after Lake Victoria rose to its highest levels in five years.
The century-old Jonglei Canal, which was never completed, has become a refuge for many.
“We don’t know up to where this flooding would have pushed us if the canal was not there,” said Peter Kuach Gatchang, the paramount chief of Pajiek. He was already raising a small garden of pumpkins and eggplants in his new home.
The 340-kilometer (211-mile) Jonglei Canal was first imagined in the early 1900s by Anglo-Egyptian colonial authorities to increase the Nile’s outflow towards Egypt in the north. But its development was interrupted by the long fight of southern Sudanese against the Sudanese regime in Khartoum that eventually led to the creation of a separate country.
Gatchang said the new community in Pajiek is neglected: "We have no school and no clinic here, and if you stay for a few days, you will see us carrying our patients on stretchers up to Ayod town.”
Ayod, the county headquarters, is reached by a six-hour walk through the waist-high water.
Pajiek also has no mobile network and no government presence. The area is under the control of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-in-Opposition, founded by President Salva Kiir’s rival turned Vice President Riek Machar.
Villagers rely on aid. On a recent day, hundreds of women lined up in a nearby field to receive some from the World Food Program.
Nyabuot Reat Kuor walked home with a 50-kilogram (110-pound) bag of sorghum balanced on her head.
“This flooding has destroyed our farm, killed our livestock and displaced us for good," the mother of eight said. “Our old village of Gorwai has become a river.”
When food assistance runs out, she said, they will survive on wild leaves and water lilies from the swamp. Already in recent years, food aid rations have been cut in half as international funding for such crises drops.
More than 69,000 people who have migrated to the Jonglei Canal in Ayod county are registered for food assistance, according to WFP.
“There are no passable roads at this time of the year, and the canal is too low to support boats carrying a lot of food,” said John Kimemia, a WFP airdrop coordinator.
In the neighboring Paguong village that is surrounded by flooded lands, the health center has few supplies. Medics haven’t been paid since June due to an economic crisis that has seen civil servants nationwide go unpaid for more than a year.
South Sudan’s economic woes have deepened with the disruption of oil exports after a major pipeline was damaged in Sudan during that country's ongoing civil war.
“The last time we got drugs was in September. We mobilized the women to carry them on foot from Ayod town,” said Juong Dok Tut, a clinical officer.
Patients, mostly women and children, sat on the ground as they waited to see the doctor. Panic rippled through the group when a thin green snake passed among them. It wasn't poisonous, but many others in the area are. People who venture into the water to fish or collect water lilies are at risk.
Four life-threatening snake bites cases occurred in October, Tut said. “We managed these cases with the antivenom treatments we had, but now they’re over, so we don’t know what to do if it happens again.”