Hezbollah launches deadliest attack on Israel since Oct 7 Hamas rampage

Missile strike from Lebanon kills at least nine and injures dozens more in annexed Golan Heights

At least nine people were killed on the annexed Golan Heights after a barrage of rockets fired from Lebanon, making it the deadliest single attack in Israeli territory since Oct 7.
Eli Bin, head of the Magen David Adom emergency service, reported nine dead and 34 wounded including 17 in critical condition after a rocket hit the town of Majdal Shams.
A statement from Hezbollah said the attack, which saw its militants firing Katyusha rockets at an Israeli army post in the Golan Heights, was in response to Israeli airstrikes on villages in south Lebanon.
Earlier, the Iran-backed group said three of its members were killed on Saturday without specifying where. Israel’s military said its air force targeted a Hezbollah arms depot in the border village of Kfar Kila, adding that militants were inside at the time.
“According to all our assessment, this is a Hezbollah attack. It’s part of their MO, shooting at civilians,” an IDF official said.
Hezbollah doesn’t have the capability to penetrate Israel’s air defence “but there’s no system in the world that is 100 per cent,” the official added.
Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria during the 1967 Six Day War and later annexed them in 1981.
Israel and Hezbollah have traded near daily fire since the war in Gaza was triggered by the surprise Oct 7 attack by Hamas, who killed some 1,200 people and took 250 others hostage.
Israel launched an offensive that has so far killed more than 39,000 people, according to local health authorities, displaced over 80 per cent of the territory’s people and triggered a humanitarian disaster in the Gaza Strip.
Over the past weeks, the exchange of fire along the Lebanon-Israel front line intensified with Israeli airstrikes and rocket and drone attacks by Hezbollah striking deeper and further away from the border.
Since early October, Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon have killed more than 450 people, mostly Hezbollah members, but also around 90 civilians and non-combatants. On the Israeli side, 21 soldiers and 13 civilians have been killed.
The health ministry in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip said an Israeli strike hit a school housing a field hospital Saturday, killing at least 30 people and wounding more than 100.
The Israeli military said it carried out a strike on the school targeting Hamas “terrorists” operating from there.
“A short while ago, the targeting of Khadija school, which had a field medical unit inside it, in Deir el-Balah area, resulted in 30 martyrs and more than 100 wounded,” the health ministry in Gaza said.
Gaza’s civil defence agency said that the school was housing about 4,000 displaced people who had taken refuge there.
An Israeli military statement said that the strike was carried out following “precise… intelligence of terrorists operating in a Hamas compound and control centre inside the Khadija school”.
“In parallel, the terrorists developed and stored large quantities of weapons inside the compound.”
The field hospital located inside the school belonged to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah, according to hospital director Khalil al-Daqran.
It came after Israel ordered the evacuation of a part of a designated humanitarian zone in Gaza ahead of a planned strike on Khan Younis on Saturday. The order was made in response to rocket fire that Israel said originated from the area.
The military said it planned an operation against Hamas militants in the city, including parts of Muwasi, the crowded tent camp in an area where Israel has told thousands of Palestinians to seek refuge throughout the war.
It’s the second evacuation order issued in a week that has included striking part of the humanitarian zone, a 60-sq-km area blanketed with tent camps that lack sanitation and medical facilities and have limited access to aid, United Nations and humanitarian groups say.
Israel expanded the zone in May to take in people fleeing Rafah, where more than half of Gaza’s population at the time had crowded. According to Israeli estimates, about 1.8 million Palestinians are currently sheltering there after being uprooted multiple times in search of safety during Israel’s punishing air and ground campaign.
In November, the military said the area could still be struck and that it was “not a safe zone, but it is a safer place than any other” in Gaza.
The US, Egypt, Qatar and Israel are scheduled to meet in Italy to discuss the ongoing hostage and ceasefire negotiations in the coming days.
CIA Director Bill Burns is expected to meet Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed Bin Abdul Rahman al-Thani, Mossad director David Barnea and Egyptian spy chief Abbas Kamel on Sunday, according to officials.