Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday accused Iran-backed Hezbollah of trying to assassinate him, with the Middle East already on edge after Israel had vowed retaliation for an Iranian missile barrage.
Netanyahu’s office said a drone was launched toward his residence in the central town of Caesarea on Saturday but he and his wife were not home at the time and there were no injuries.
“The attempt by Iran’s proxy Hezbollah to assassinate me and my wife today was a grave mistake,” Netanyahu said in a statement.
“Anyone who tries to harm Israel’s citizens will pay a heavy price,” he said in comments to Tehran and “its proxies”, which include Lebanon’s Hezbollah, a group Israel has been at war with since late September.
Military spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said a drone “hit a building in Caesarea, while trying to hit the prime minister”.
While fighting a two-front war, in Lebanon and in Gaza, Israel has also vowed to respond to Iran’s October 1 missile barrage with a “deadly, precise and surprising,” attack, according to Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant.
Iran said it fired 200 missiles at its arch-foe in response to the killing of an Iranian general and Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah.
Gaza’s civil defence agency said on Saturday that a sweeping Israeli military operation has killed more than 400 people in two weeks in the territory’s north, where Israel kept hammering militant targets while fighting Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Hamas ally Hezbollah has vowed to intensify attacks on Israel and on Saturday launched rocket barrages at Israel’s north, where rescuers said one man was killed by shrapnel.
Hamas, Hezbollah and allied Iran-backed groups in the region have vowed to keep fighting after Israeli troops killed the Palestinian movement’s leader Yahya Sinwar in Gaza, more than a year into the war triggered by Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack.
Analysts said Sinwar, accused of masterminding that attack on Israel, was pivotal to ending the Gaza war and securing the release of Israeli hostages.
Israel, vowing to stop Hamas militants from regrouping in northern Gaza, launched a major air and ground assault on October 6, tightening its siege on the war-battered area and sending tens of thousands of people fleeing.
Civil defence agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal said “we have recovered more than 400 martyrs from the various targeted areas in the northern Gaza Strip”, including Jabalia and its refugee camp, since the Israeli operation began.
The actual death toll may be higher, Bassal told AFP, as “there are dozens of bodies scattered in the streets of Jabalia”.
Contacted by AFP, the Israeli military said it was looking into the civil defence agency’s reports out of Gaza, including that an overnight air raid on Jabalia killed 33 people.
“More than a year has passed, and every day our blood is shed,” displaced Gazan Nasser Shaqura said outside a hospital in Deir el-Balah, where victims of an Israeli air strike were taken.
“Every day, every hour, there is a massacre,” he said. “This is what our lives have become”.
– ‘Lost everything’ –
The violence has dashed hopes that Sinwar’s death on Wednesday could bring the war to an end or lead to the swift release of 97 hostages still held in Gaza including 34 the Israeli military says are dead.
The war was sparked by the unprecedented Hamas attack last year that resulted in the deaths of 1,206 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures.
Israel’s campaign to crush Hamas and bring back the hostages has killed 42,519 people in Gaza, mostly civilians, according to data from the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory, figures the UN considers reliable.
Witnesses told AFP that air strikes continued to pound northern Gaza on Saturday, and medics said Israeli forces were shelling the Indonesian Hospital.
The Gaza health ministry said two patients had died, blaming the Israeli siege and lack of medical supplies.
The military reported troops operating near the facility but said “no intentional fire” was directed at it.
Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, reported “critical shortage of fuel and medical supplies… in the last remaining hospitals” in the besieged territory’s north.
And “another 20,000 people were forced to flee Jabalia camp” on Friday, he said on social media platform X.
The Israeli army said two soldiers “fell in combat in northern Gaza” on Saturday, taking to 357 the death toll among troops in Gaza since the start of the ground offensive in late October 2023.
– Strikes on Lebanon –
On Friday, Qatar-based Hamas official Khalil al-Hayya reiterated that the group would not free Israeli hostages “unless the aggression against our people in Gaza stops”.
Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose country supports Hamas, said the regional “resistance front” against Israel “will not end at all with the martyrdom of Sinwar”, the latest in a series of Tehran-aligned militant leader killings.
Defence ministers from the G7 rich nations — Italy, France, Germany, Britain, Japan, Canada and the United States — called on Iran to stop supporting Hamas and Hezbollah.
In a statement after a meeting in Italy, they also expressed concern over “the risk of further escalation” in the Middle East as well as “threats to UNIFIL’s security”.
In Lebanon, where Israel last month escalated air raids and deployed ground forces after nearly a year of cross-border exchanges with Hezbollah, state media and the health ministry reported more deadly strikes on Saturday.
Israel said its air force struck “Hezbollah weapons storage facilities” and an intelligence centre in the group’s south Beirut stronghold, while ground forces continued “targeted” raids in southern Lebanon.
Since late September, the war has left at least 1,454 people dead in Lebanon, according to an AFP tally of Lebanese health ministry figures.
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