The pro-Iranian militia said it targeted the Israeli foreign intelligence base on Wednesday, September 25, in an unprecedented strike. The projectile was destroyed by anti-aircraft defenses before it reached its target.
This is the first time that a missile fired from Lebanon has penetrated so deeply into Israeli territory. In the early hours of Wednesday, September 25, air raid sirens sounded in Tel Aviv, about a hundred kilometers south of the Lebanese border, before a projectile was shot down by anti-aircraft defenses. In a statement, Lebanese Hezbollah claimed to have targeted “with a Qader-1 ballistic missile, the Mossad headquarters in the suburbs of Tel Aviv” The pro-Iranian Islamist militia added that the targeted location was “responsible for the assassination of the leaders» you Hezbollah «and explosions of pagers and walkie-talkies».
The target was reportedly the Glilot base, located near Herzliya in the Tel Aviv metropolitan area. The location is home to the bases of several military intelligence units, as well as, according to Israeli media, the headquarters of foreign intelligence, the Mossad.
As Israel continues its third consecutive day of massive bombings in Lebanon, the Israeli army spokesman has rejected the idea that the strike “cements the equation of ‘blow for blow’, and ‘Tel Aviv for Beirut'”, as analyzed on Wednesday morning by the Lebanese channel Al Mayadeen, which is rather favorable to the Lebanese movement. “The munitions used by Hezbollah do not have the same degree of precision as ours. They say they are targeting the Mossad headquarters, but in truth this missile could have fallen anywhere,” stressed IDF spokesman Nadav Shoshani.
For the past week, the Hebrew state has intensified its operations targeting Hezbollah in Lebanon: deadly explosions have hit the movement’s transmission devices, and an Israeli strike left 55 dead, decapitating its elite force, al-Radwan, whose leader Ibrahim Aqil was killed. On Tuesday evening, another Hezbollah military leader, Ibrahim Mohammed Kobeissi, was killed in an Israeli strike on the southern suburbs of Beirut. Since Monday, intense strikes from Tel Aviv have targeted its strongholds in southern and eastern Lebanon as well as in the southern suburbs of Beirut, leaving at least 558 dead.
Israel announced in mid-September that it had moved the “center of gravity” of the war to the north of the country, along the Lebanese border, to allow the return of tens of thousands of residents displaced by cross-border violence. Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas and Iran, has for its part promised to continue attacking Israel “until the end of the aggression in Gaza”.
