Dozens of detonations were heard and explosions were visible in the sky.
AFP
Iran on Tuesday fired missiles at Israel, where warning sirens sounded across the territory, after the army called on the population to prepare for a “large-scale” attack.
In Tehran, the official IRNA news agency announced Iran’s firing of “missiles on Tel Aviv”, without any further details.
Interceptor missiles were fired by the Israeli army above Jerusalem against projectiles coming from the east visible in their light traces, AFP journalists noted.
Dozens of detonations were heard and explosions were visible in the sky. Warning sirens rang out across the territory. Traffic was completely halted at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport.
The Iranian attack came the day Israel announced ground military operations in southern Lebanon against Hezbollah, an ally of Israel’s archenemy Iran, and four days after the assassination of the movement’s leader Lebanese Hassan Nasrallah, in an Israeli raid near Beirut.
“In response to the martyrs of Ismaïl Haniyeh, Hassan Nasrallah and Abbas Nilforoushan (deputy head of the Guards), we aimed at the heart of the occupied territories” (Israel), indicated in a press release the Revolutionary Guards, the army ideology of Iran, which also threatened “crushing attacks” if Israel responded to the missile attacks.
The United States had warned
Hours earlier, a U.S. official said Iran was preparing to carry out an imminent ballistic missile attack on Israel.
“The United States has indications that Iran is preparing to launch an imminent ballistic missile attack” against Israel, he told AFP. Such an attack would “result in serious consequences” for Iran.
“The shots coming from Iran could be on a large scale,” Daniel Hagari, the army spokesperson, had previously warned. In the event of an attack, the army “is ready to defend itself and attack,” he said.
On April 13, in response to a deadly strike attributed to Israel on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Iran fired some 350 explosive drones and missiles towards Israel, the first direct attack of its kind, and which injured a Bedouin girl. Most of the missiles were intercepted by Israel with the help of foreign countries, especially the United States.
Waiting in Tel-Aviv
In addition, four people were killed and seven others injured Tuesday in Tel Aviv in an automatic weapons attack perpetrated by two shooters, who were “neutralized,” Israeli police said after initially reporting seven injured .
According to surveillance camera images broadcast by Israeli television, the two shooters opened fire while getting off a tram at the Sderot-Yeroushalaïm stop, in the Jaffa district. “The two terrorists were neutralized on the spot,” the police said in a press release.
After the devastating blow to Hezbollah with the death of its leader Hassan Nasrallah, killed Friday in an Israeli strike near Beirut, and after a week of Israeli strikes that left hundreds dead in Lebanon, Israel warned that the war It was not over against the Lebanese movement.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said Hassan Nasrallah’s death “will not be in vain” and Iran’s First Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref warned it would bring Israel’s “destruction.”
In southern Lebanon, a Hezbollah stronghold, the scale of Israeli ground operations was not immediately known.
The UN Interim Force in Lebanon, deployed on the border with Israel, assured that it had not detected an Israeli incursion. The Lebanese army and Hezbollah have denied such an incursion.
According to an Israeli official, these are “localized raids of a very limited scale”, intended to “repel threats against civilian communities in northern Israel”, bordering southern Lebanon and the target of Hezbollah fire.
The Israeli army called on residents of 27 towns in southern Lebanon to evacuate.
According to the American site Axios, citing Israeli officials, the ground operation is “not aimed at occupying southern Lebanon”, from which Israel withdrew in 2000 after 22 years of occupation.
Strikes in Lebanon, shots on Israel
“If necessary, we will reach Beirut. We have patience and strength, we are the strongest army in the world,” said Yossi Cohen, a 60-year-old firefighter from Haifa.
“If they (Israeli soldiers) enter (Lebanon), they will dig their graves with their own hands (…) They will not come out alive,” says Inas, a displaced person on the other side of the border. from the southern suburbs of Beirut.
In addition to ground operations, the Israeli Air Force carried out strikes near Beirut and other deadly strikes in southern Lebanon.
Hezbollah said it had fired rockets towards a base near Tel Aviv (center) and northern Israel.
On October 8, 2023, Hezbollah opened a front against Israel in support of Hamas, the day after the start of the war in Gaza triggered by an unprecedented attack by the Palestinian movement on October 7, 2023 against Israel.
Since then, localities on the Israeli-Lebanese border have been caught in a spiral of cross-border violence, before an intensification of Israeli strikes in mid-September against Hezbollah, with the objective of stopping the shooting of this movement and allowing the return of tens of thousands of inhabitants in northern Israel.
In Lebanon, more than a thousand people have been killed, according to the Ministry of Health, since the explosions of Hezbollah transmission devices on September 16 and 17, attributed to Israel, and the start of massive bombings which targeted Hezbollah strongholds. Hezbollah from September 23.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced in Lebanon.
Faced with the escalation, several airlines extended the suspension of their flights to Beirut and Tel Aviv, and several countries organized evacuations of their nationals residing in Lebanon.
(afp)
