D“missiles were fired from Iran towards Israel” said the Israeli army this Tuesday at the end of the day, while the United States had already warned of potential attacks. Sirens are now ringing throughout Israel, according to the Israeli army.
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.
Hours earlier, a U.S. official said Iran was preparing to carry out an imminent ballistic missile attack on Israel.
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“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.
An attack in Tel Aviv
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.
