Hezbollah fires rocket barrage in escalating battle with Israel

Tensions between Israel and Hezbollah heightened after the Lebanon-based militant group fired rockets at a northern Israeli town, killing one person.

The assault, a response to an Israeli airstrike on Lebanon that killed seven people, is likely to further fuel concerns the near-daily border skirmishes could escalate into a full-blown war, opening a new front for Israel as it seeks to destroy Hamas in Gaza.

Hezbollah’s Al Manar TV said Wednesday that the Iran-backed group launched “tens of missiles” at Kiryat Shmona and an army barracks after Israel bombed the southern Lebanese town of al-Habbariyeh.

Israel’s emergency service said a civilian was killed by the rocket barrage. Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency reported that seven people were killed by Israel’s strike on al-Habbariyeh and that it hit an emergency center.

Israel Defense Forces said its fighter jets struck a military compound and a “significant terrorist operative” belonging to the al-Jamaa al-Islamiya group, which had launched attacks on Israel.

The tit-for-tat raids come as pressure mounts on Israel to agree to a cease-fire in the Gaza strip. The war was a response to Hamas’s surprise Oct. 7 attacks in which 1,200 people were killed and 250 were taken hostage by the group.

More than 32,000 Gazans, the majority of them women and children, have been killed by Israel’s retaliatory offensive on the territory, according to health officials in the Hamas-run enclave.

In a recent poll conducted by the Israeli Democracy Institute, 69% of those surveyed said they think there’s a very high or fairly high likelihood of an all out war breaking out soon between Israel and Hezbollah.

Hezbollah, which is designated a terrorist group by the U.S., is the most powerful militia in the Middle East and thought by Israeli intelligence to have more than 100,000 rockets and missiles, a much bigger arsenal than what Hamas is believed to have had before Oct. 7.