Hezbollah’s new strategy;
Striking Haifa for Dahieh, Tel Aviv for Beirut
Hamas and Hezbollah resistance groups launched rocket attacks on the occupied territories on Monday on the first anniversary of the former’s Operation Al-Aqsa Storm last October.
Hamas’s armed wing said it fired a barrage of rockets at Israel’s commercial hub Tel Aviv on Monday.
The Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades “struck deep into the occupation’s territory, targeting the city of Tel Aviv with a barrage of M90 missiles as part of the ongoing war of attrition,” the group said in a statement.
Projectiles fired from Gaza set off sirens in central Tel Aviv.
The attack, which also saw missiles launched into northern Israel, injured at least two people.
Hamas’s armed wing vowed to keep fighting what it described as a “long war of attrition”.
“We choose to keep up the fight in a long war of attrition, one that is painful and costly for the enemy,” said Abu Obeida, spokesman of the group’s armed wing.
Khaled Meshaal, the former head of Hamas, said on the Al Arabiya TV channel that Hamas’s operation on October 7, 2023 took Israel back to “square zero and threatened its existence.”
Meshaal said last year’s daring attack was “a natural response to the occupation and its accelerating plans for settlement, siege and aggression against al-Aqsa,” referring to the flashpoint al-Aqsa Mosque compound in the occupied Old City of al-Quds.
He also accused Israel of threatening Egypt and Jordan, despite long-standing peace agreements between the countries, saying, “The enemy wants everyone in the region to be subject to him and he does this even with countries that do not fight him.”
He added that Israel “attacks Arab and Islamic national security everywhere.”
Israel launched the war on Gaza after Hamas waged the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Flood against the occupying entity in response to the Israeli regime’s decades-long campaign of bloodshed and devastation against Palestinians.
Israel’s war on Gaza has claimed the lived of nearly 42,000 Palestinians so far.
Israel has also been targeting Lebanon since October 2023, when it launched the genocidal war on the Gaza Strip. Since late last month, the regime has escalated its strikes on Lebanon, killing more than 2,000 people and displaced thousands of Lebanese.
Lebanon’s Hezbollah has been responding to the aggression with retaliatory operations.
On Monday, Hezbollah hit the regime’s third-largest city of Haifa with rockets in the first direct attack on the northern city that evaded the regime air defense systems.
Hezbollah said it targeted a military base south of Haifa with a salvo of “Fadi 1” missiles.
Israeli media said 10 people were wounded in Haifa and Tiberias. Police in Haifa said several buildings and properties were damaged, with several reports of minor injuries and some people having been taken to a nearby hospital.