A Hezbollah drone attack on an army base in central Israel killed four soldiers and severely wounded seven others on Sunday, the Israeli military said, in the deadliest strike by the militant group since Israel launched its ground invasion of Lebanon nearly two weeks ago,
The Guardian reports.
Hezbollah called the attack near Binyamina city a retaliation for Israeli strikes on Beirut on Thursday that killed 22 people. It later said it targeted Israel’s elite Golani brigade, launching dozens of missiles to occupy Israeli air defence systems during the assault by “squadrons” of drones.
Israel’s national rescue service said the attack wounded 61. With Israel’s advanced air-defence systems, it is rare for so many people to be hurt in aerial attacks, but Israel has struggled to deal with Hezbollah’s newly deployed Iranian-made drones in the past 12 months; they are small and hard to detect as they emit only weak radar signals.
Hezbollah and Israel have traded fire almost daily in the year since the war in Gaza began, and fighting has escalated.
The attack followed news that the US is sending a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (Thaad) missile defence battery to Israel, reportedly along with about 100 US troops, deepening American involvement in the crisis-hit region. The last time the US sent such a missile system to the Middle East was in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s attacks on Israel on 7 October last year. The Pentagon said a Thaad was deployed to southern Israel for drills in 2019, the last and only time it was known to be there.
When asked why he had decided to give permission for the deployment, the US president, Joe Biden, said: “To defend Israel”, which is weighing an expected retaliation against Iran after Tehran fired more than 180 missiles at Israel on 1 October.
The Pentagon spokesperson Maj Gen Patrick Ryder described the deployment as part of “the broader adjustments the US military has made in recent months” to support Israel and defend US personnel from attacks by Iran and Iranian-backed groups.
