Hezbollah said on Monday that it had launched rockets at an army intelligence base in the suburbs of the Israeli city of Tel Aviv. The attack comes amid the ongoing escalation between the Hezbollah and Israel. On Sunday, Hezbollah said it had downed as Israeli drone without specifying the location.
Hezbollah fighters launched “quality rockets” at “the Glilot base of the Military Intelligence Unit 8200 in the Tel Aviv suburbs,” the group said on Monday adding the attack was “in defense of Lebanon,” “in response to Israeli aggressions” and dedicated to their slain leader Hassan Nasrallah.
The Israeli army said its forces were pummelling Hezbollah’s financial arm, hitting more than two dozen targets including a bunker with tens of millions of dollars in cash and gold. The strikes since Sunday night mark an expansion of Israel’s campaign against the Iran-backed group after a year of cross-border exchanges that escalated in late September into a full-blown war.
“The Israeli Air Force carried out a series of precise strikes on these Hezbollah financial strongholds,” military spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said in a televised briefing.
“One of our main targets last night was an underground vault with tens of millions of dollars in cash and gold. The money was being used to finance Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel.” The announcements came as the army said it continued to hammer an array of Hezbollah positions across Lebanon, including strikes against about 300 targets in the previous 24 hours.
A US official said Monday that the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah had “escalated out of control,” and called for the enforcement of a United Nations resolution that ended the sides’ last major war, in 2006, but that has done nothing to slow the latest round of deadly hostilities in Lebanon. The official, Amos Hochstein, a special adviser to President Joe Biden on the Israel-Hezbollah conflict, spoke in Beirut, his first visit to the Lebanese capital since the Israeli military launched a ground offensive and intensified its aerial attacks against Hezbollah last month. Israel’s military campaign against the Iranian-backed armed group has set off a humanitarian crisis in Lebanon, displacing around a fifth of the population, and killed more than 2,400 Lebanese over the past year, according to the country’s Health Ministry.
(With agency inputs)
