Israel and Hezbollah edged closer towards full scale war on Tuesday, as the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group launched explosive drones at a key Israeli command base, declaring the attack part of its response to recent high-level Israeli assassinations in Lebanon.
Hezbollah announced it had launched “a number of explosive attack drones” at the Israeli northern military command base in Safed, the first time it has targeted the site.
As air raid sirens sounded across northern Israel on Tuesday, Israeli aircraft, drones and artillery struck multiple targets inside southern Lebanon, including a strike on a car during the funeral of a senior commander in the group’s elite Radwan force who had been killed the day before.
Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati – a Sunni businessman and politician who describes himself as “liberal” and is not part of Hezbollah – said that while his country was open to negotiations, it was being threatened with war.
“We seek permanent stability and call for a lasting peaceful solution,” said Mikati. “But in return we receive warnings through international envoys about a war on Lebanon,” he added, in reference to reported threats from Israel passed through foreign diplomats. “The position I repeat to these delegates is: do you support the idea of destruction? Is what is happening in Gaza acceptable?”
Hezbollah cited the killings of Wissam al-Tawil, a senior figure in the group, on Monday and Saleh al-Arouri, the Hamas deputy chief, last week in its statement about the strike on the Safed base. Both killings took place on Lebanese soil.
Hezbollah is both a political party with ministers in the Lebanese cabinet and a militant movement with forces that are stronger than the national army. Lebanon has a power-sharing system with key roles divided up along sectarian lines.
Hezbollah said it also attacked at least six Israeli military posts along the border on Tuesday.
Israeli media reports and video footage posted on social media confirmed that at least one drone had landed inside the area of the Safed base.
Hezbollah announced that several had been launched. The drone appeared to have landed in an open area of the base close to a car park, with smoke from the explosion visible in some footage.
The Israeli army confirmed that a “hostile aircraft” had come down at one of its bases in the north and said that “no injuries or damage were reported”.
The border violence has forced tens of thousands of people to flee on both sides and raised fears the conflict could increase.
Israel has said it was giving a chance for diplomacy to prevent Hezbollah firing on people living in its north and to push Hezbollah back from the border, warning that the Israeli army would otherwise take action to achieve these aims.
However, Israel has launched a series of highly provocative attacks against targets in Lebanon in the past week, including the high-profile assassination of Arouri, the first strike on the Lebanese capital Beirut since 2006.
According to reports, the man killed at the funeral on Tuesday was Ali Hussein Barji, the commander of Hezbollah’s aerial forces in southern Lebanon. Israeli media said he had directed the Safed attack.
The killing took place as hundreds of Hezbollah supporters attended Tawil’s funeral procession, the group’s yellow flag draped over his coffin.
Tawil was regarded as an important figure in Hezbollah. He was involved in the abduction of Israeli soldiers, which triggered the group’s last war with Israel in 2006, as well as high-calibre operations in Syria. He had also “directed numerous operations” against Israeli forces since the Gaza war began, Hezbollah said.
The escalating violence came as the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, tours the Middle East in an attempt to prevent the war between Israel and Hamas from spreading regionally.
In a pointed warning, the Hezbollah deputy leader, Naim Qassem, said in a televised speech on Tuesday that his group did not want to expand the war from Lebanon, “but if Israel expands [it], the response is inevitable to the maximum extent required to deter Israel”.
Qassem added that Israel’s wave of targeted killings “cannot lead to a phase of retreat but rather to a push forward for the resistance”.
Earlier on Tuesday, an Israeli drone strike hit a car in southern Lebanon, some 10km from the border, killing three people inside it, security officials in the area and the state news agency said. Sources did not immediately identify those killed.
The Safed strike was the second to hit a significant Israeli military location in recent days after an attack on the Mount Meron airbase on Saturday, which caused significant damage.
A sharp escalation of violence between Israel and Hezbollah is fuelling fears that Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza is in danger of spreading across the region.
Tuesday’s attacks, including several relatively far from the immediate border area, have underlined the rising tensions along the frontier since Hezbollah started attacking Israeli military posts a day after the 7 October assault on southern Israel by the Gaza-based militant group Hamas.
Hezbollah has said that by keeping Israel’s northern front active, it is helping to reduce pressure on Hamas in Gaza.