Hezbollah fires rockets at Israel in response to killing in Beirut

JERUSALEM – The Lebanese militia Hezbollah fired a volley of rockets toward a small military base in northern Israel on Saturday, in what the group said was an initial response to the assassination of a senior Hamas commander in Lebanon this past week that has raised fears of a wider conflict.

Hezbollah said in a statement that the strikes had caused casualties, but the Israeli military said no one was hurt. The assault was initially perceived by analysts as more a symbolic response to the killing than a significant escalation.

The Israeli military said in a statement that roughly 40 rockets had been fired from Lebanon toward Mount Meron, an area housing a military radar station that is roughly 5 miles south of the Israel-Lebanon border. The military said that it had responded by striking a militant group in Lebanon that had been involved in the rocket fire, without specifying its identity.

Hezbollah could still respond with a more forceful attack, while Hamas has yet to retaliate for the assassination of the senior commander, Saleh Arouri. Arouri was killed Tuesday in Beirut, Lebanon’s capital, in an attack attributed by Hamas and Hezbollah to Israel.

Lebanese and U.S. officials have also ascribed the attack to Israel, although Israel has not confirmed its role.

At least for now, the limited nature of the exchange Saturday tempered fears that Arouri’s killing would immediately lead to a major escalation between Hezbollah and Israel.

“There may be something yet to come,” said Nicholas Blanford, a Beirut-based analyst and historian of Hezbollah. But for now, Blanford said, “It’s just another day in the south.”

The tit-for-tat exchanges were “within a certain threshold,” he added.

The exchange came as Antony Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, and Josep Borrell, the European Union’s top diplomat, separately visited the region in an effort to reduce the risk of a regional war.

Hamas attacked Israel from the Gaza Strip on Oct. 7, leading Israel to respond in Gaza with one of the deadliest military campaigns this century. At the same time, Israel had been engaged in a low-level second conflict with Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas and a fellow proxy of Iran.

That second front has mostly been contained within the border areas of northern Israel and southern Lebanon, with both sides generally limiting their strikes to within a few miles of the border, far from major cities like Tel Aviv, Israel, or Beirut.

But the killing of Arouri, in a building deep inside a Hezbollah stronghold in southern Beirut, prompted fears that Hezbollah might respond with a more forceful attack of its own on major cities in central Israel. Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, has made two speeches since the assassination, most recently on Friday, in which he pledged that the killing would not go “unpunished.”

He avoided going into detail, amid assessments by analysts that he wanted to prevent a major escalation that would provoke an Israeli invasion of Lebanon. During the last major conflict between Hezbollah and Israel, in 2006, Israel pummeled parts of Beirut and invaded parts of southern Lebanon – an outcome that other Lebanese leaders have said they hope to avoid more than 17 years later.

“It seems to me that Hezbollah has no interest in escalating this into a full-blown conflict,” Blanford said. “The question now is what the Israelis are going to do.”

Thousands of residents of northern Israel have been evacuated from their homes since the start of the war to protect them from the daily exchanges of fire along the border. In order for them to return home, Israel wants Hezbollah fighters to withdraw from the border areas of southern Lebanon.

For now, the United States is involved in diplomatic efforts to reduce tensions – but if that fails, Israel’s government has hinted that it may resort to a more aggressive military operation, and possibly even an invasion of Lebanon.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a U.S. envoy, Amos Hochstein, on Thursday that Israel would not stop until the residents of northern Israel can return safely to their homes, a goal that it would pursue “diplomatically, which Israel prefers, or in some other way,” according to a government readout.

Blinken was in Turkey on Saturday, meeting with his Turkish counterpart and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with whom he discussed the need to keep the Gaza conflict from spreading, among other subjects, according to a State Department statement. Later, he met with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis on the island of Crete.

Speaking to reporters, Blinken said that “we want to do everything possible to make sure we don’t see escalation” in the violence between Israel and Hezbollah. He also noted that Turkey could play a role in a plan for postwar Gaza.

“I think from our conversations today, it’s clear that Turkey is prepared to play a positive, productive role in work that needs to happen the day after the conflict ends,” he said, adding that Turkey could also use its ties with countries in the region to “to do everything possible to de-escalate and to prevent the conflict from spreading.”

Borrell was visiting Lebanon, where he said his priority was to “avoid regional escalation and to advance diplomatic efforts” for peace in the region.

Borrell has been at the forefront of diplomatic efforts to ensure that the war in Gaza ends with an attempt to create a Palestinian state in Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank. For now, that appears a distant prospect, however, with Israeli strikes and ground operations continuing inside Gaza on Saturday with multiple people killed, according to Wafa, a news agency run by the Palestine Liberation Organization.

The strikes targeted areas in Deir el-Balah, Khan Younis and Rafah, three cities where more than 1 million Palestinians displaced by Israeli military operations have fled. According to the United Nations, Rafah, a small area next to the Egyptian border, now houses roughly half of the Gaza Strip’s prewar population of 2.2 million.

More than 22,000 people in Gaza have been killed in Israeli airstrikes since the war began, according to Gaza health authorities.

With widespread fuel, food and water shortages, “Gaza has simply become uninhabitable,” according to a statement released Friday by Martin Griffiths, the head of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Mohammad al-Masri, a 31-year-old accountant in Rafah, said he had heard strikes overnight.

“No one thinks they are safe here,” said al-Masri, who fled to the area earlier in the war.

“What is protecting us except for a few pieces of nylon?” he added, referring to the tents that house many of the displaced people in Rafah.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.