DOMESTIC UNREST: Three people were arrested after flares landed near Netanyahu’s residence, in an incident that a lawmaker blamed on anti-government protesters
AFP, BEIRUT, Lebanon
Israeli airstrikes yesterday struck Beirut’s southern suburbs in rapid succession, a day after heavy bombardment as the Israeli army said it targeted Hezbollah sites.
Three strikes hit separate locations in the morning, sending thick clouds of white smoke over the targets.
It followed a sustained Israeli assault on the same area on Saturday.
A column of smoke rises from an explosion during an Israeli airstrike that targeted a neighborhood in Beirut’s southern suburbs yesterday.
Photo: AFP
Shortly before the latest strikes, the Israeli army warned people to leave Hadath, Burj al-Barajneh and Chiyah, saying they were near “Hezbollah sites and assets.”
Further south, overnight Israeli airstrikes and artillery shelling hit the southern town of Khiam, about 6km from the border, Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency reported.
The bombardment came after Israel’s military reported a “heavy rocket barrage” on Haifa late on Saturday and said a synagogue was hit, wounding two civilians.
Since Sept. 23, Israel has ramped up its air campaign in Lebanon, later sending in ground troops following almost a year of limited, cross-border exchanges begun by Hezbollah over the Gaza war.
In the Palestinian territory, where Hamas’ attack on Israel triggered the war, the civil defense agency said Israeli airstrikes killed at least 20 people, including four women and three children.
The deadliest strike killed 10 people in the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza, civil defense spokesman Mahmud Bassal said.
At least one woman was killed and 10 were wounded in another strike on a house in the same camp, he said.
Five other people were killed and 11 wounded by a “missile launched by an Israeli drone” yesterday morning in the southern city of Rafah, Bassal said.
Four others — three women and a child — were killed in an overnight strike on a house in the west of the Nuseirat camp in central Gaza, he added.
The Gaza health ministry on Saturday said the overall death toll in more than 13 months of war had reached 43,799.
Police in Israel yesterday morning said that three suspects were arrested after two flares landed near Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s residence in the central town of Caesarea.
Two flares had landed near Netanyahu’s residence on Saturday evening in what the Shin Bet, the Israeli domestic security agency, called a “serious incident,” although the prime minister was not present at the time.
Police said in a statement that a court ordered a gag on publishing any details of the investigation or the suspects’ identities for 30 days, adding that suspects would be interrogated jointly with the Shin Bet.
Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana accused anti-government protesters of being behind the incident.
“The writing was on the walls, on the streets, in incendiary messages and in demonstrations,” he said, referring to regular anti-government protests that erupted early last year.
