An explosives-laden drone launched by Hezbollah in Lebanon blew up in the IDF Northern Command headquarters in Safed on Tuesday morning, as sirens sounded in northern communities and Lebanese officials reported that three members of the Iran-backed group had been killed in an Israeli strike in the south of Lebanon.
The spike in violence comes despite efforts by the international community to keep the fighting across Israel’s northern border from escalating into a full-blown conflict.
Hezbollah claimed responsibility for the attack, which struck a major IDF command center, and said it launched “a number of explosive attack drones” at the base in response to the alleged Israeli assassinations of senior Hezbollah commander Wissam al-Tawil on Monday and top Hamas official Saleh al-Arouri in Lebanon last week.
The IDF confirmed the incident, which triggered a number of hostile aircraft invasion alerts and rocket sirens in northern communities including Safed, Ayelet Hashachar, Avivim, Yiftah, Dishon and Biriyeh.
The army said there were no casualties in the strike. Footage shared on social media showed smoke rising from a parking lot in the base and minor damage to a nearby building.
The IDF said it had launched interceptor missiles at several more “aerial targets” that entered Israeli airspace from Lebanon, and added that several rockets and missiles were also fired from Lebanon at the Malkia and Yiftah areas on the border.
Separately, the IDF said it carried out a series of strikes on Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon’s Kafr Kila on Tuesday morning, said that a drone-launching squad was hit before it could carry out an attack.
Meanwhile, two sources familiar with Hezbollah told the Reuters news agency that three members of the Iran-aligned group were killed in a targeted strike on their vehicle in the town of Ghandouriyeh in the south of Lebanon.
Hezbollah later announced the deaths of two members, naming them as Sharif Sayyid Nasser and Issa Ali Nour a-Din.
Since October 8, Hezbollah has launched hundreds of rockets, drones and anti-tank missiles over the border in support of fellow Iran-backed terror group Hamas amid Israel’s invasion of Gaza, which followed Hamas’s October 7 massacre in southern Israel. The daily exchanges of fire on the restive northern frontier have appeared to intensify in recent days.
The alleged assassinations will likely also complicate US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s bid to keep Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip from expanding into a second front, as the top US diplomat makes a whirlwind tour to the region.
Blinken arrived in Israel on Tuesday and is expected to also visit the West Bank during his two-day stay, before wrapping up his trip in Egypt.
Israel has threatened to go to war against the terror group if the strikes do not halt, with some 80,000 people from northern Israel currently displaced by the fighting, alongside tens of thousands from the south evacuated due to the Hamas onslaught and ensuing war.
The skirmishes have resulted in four civilian deaths on the Israeli side, as well as the deaths of nine IDF soldiers. There have also been several attacks from Syria, without any injuries.
Hezbollah has named 156 members who have been killed by Israel during the ongoing skirmishes, mostly in Lebanon but some also in Syria. In Lebanon, another 19 operatives from other terror groups, a Lebanese soldier, and at least 19 civilians, three of whom were journalists, have been killed.
The US is still hoping to keep fighting at a low boil, with analysts saying all-out war would devastate both Lebanon and Israel, due to Hezbollah’s vast firepower.
“This is a moment of profound tension for the region. This is a conflict that could easily metastasize, causing even more insecurity and suffering,” Blinken told reporters in Doha on Sunday.
Since October 8 — a day after thousands of Hamas terrorists murdered some 1,200 and kidnapped over 240 in southern Israel — Hezbollah-led forces have attacked Israeli communities and military posts along the northern border on a near-daily basis, with the group saying it is doing so to support Gaza amid the war there.
Agencies contributed to this report.