A summary of today's developments
Lebanon’s Hezbollah launched over 100 rockets early on Sunday across a wide and deep area of northern Israel, with some landing near the city of Haifa. The barrage came after an Israeli airstrike in Beirut on Friday killed at least 45 people, including one of Hezbollah’s top leaders, as well as women and children.
The Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, said Israeli strikes on Lebanon would continue until it was safe for evacuated people in the north of Israel to return. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel has in recent days dealt Hezbollah “a series of blows it could not have imagined”. Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, meanwhile, claimed that Israel does not want a war with Lebanon but stressed it has a right to self-defence.
Hezbollah’s deputy secretary-general Naim Qassem said that the Lebanese militant group had entered a new phase of its conflict with Israel which he described as an “open-ended battle of reckoning”.
Israel’s civil defence agency ordered all schools in the north of the country to close.
Israeli forces raided the office of global news channel Al Jazeera in the occupied West Bank on Sunday and issued a 45-day closure order. The Israeli military said that it closed the Al Jazeera TV office in Ramallah because it incited “terror”, an accusation the network vehemently denies.
The United Nations special coordinator for Lebanon, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, warned of an “imminent catastrophe” in the Middle East.
At least 41,431 Palestinian people have been killed and 95,818 injured in Israeli strikes on Gaza since 7 October, the Gaza health ministry said.
An Israeli airstrike killed at least seven people in the Kafr Qasem school in Beach camp – which was sheltering displaced families – in Gaza City on Sunday, Palestinian health officials said.
Twelve people were arrested in six different Iranian provinces for being “operatives collaborating with the Zionist regime (Israel)“ and planning acts against the country’s security, the Revolutionary Guards said, according to the Student News Network.
