Hezbollah launched a series of rocket barrages at northern Israel on Monday, according to the Israel Defense Forces, in response to an Israeli strike that killed a terror operative outside a south Lebanon hospital earlier in the day.
A barrage of some 25 rockets was launched from Lebanon at the northern city of Kiryat Shmona on Monday evening, the IDF said. According to the military, some of the rockets were intercepted.
The Magen David Adom ambulance service was scanning impact sites for possible injuries.
A short while earlier, Hezbollah launched a barrage of some 35 rockets at the Mount Meron area in northern Israel. The IDF said the rockets struck open areas and there were no reports of injuries, though the impacts sparked at least one fire near the northern community of Safsufa.
The rocket launchers used in the attack on Mount Meron were later hit in
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KABOOM!...
s, the military said.
The strikes came days after the mountainside gravesite of second-century rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai on Mount Meron was ordered largely shut and declared a closed military zone, in an attempt to stop thousands of religious Jews from attending the annual Lag B’Omer pilgrimage there in close range of Hezbollah missiles from southern Lebanon.
An emergency law passed by the Knesset last week shuttered the site for all but a handful of approved attendees over the holiday, an event that normally attracts more than 100,000 revelers and is considered the world’s largest Jewish pilgrimage.
Claiming responsibility for the first barrage, Hezbollah said it fired "dozens of Katyusha rockets" at northern Israel in response to the deadly Israeli strike in southern Lebanon earlier in the day.
The IDF confirmed that a terror operative who was identified at a rocket launching site in southern Lebanon’s Aynata, adjacent to Bint Jbeil, was killed in the airstrike. The site had recently been used to fire rockets at the Malkia area in northern Israel.
Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency (NNA) reported that "an enemy drone" targeted "a cycle of violence near the Salah Ghandour hospital in the town of Bint Jbeil," killing one person and wounding others, without specifying whether they were civilians.
The Islamic Health Committee, affiliated with Hezbollah, runs the hospital in the southern town. The facility’s administration said one person was killed and 10 were maimed, four of them seriously.
Lebanon’s health ministry condemned the "brutal Israeli strike" on the hospital, calling it a "war crime" in a statement.