Rockets fired at Tel Aviv for first time, Netanyahu to fly to US

The IDF on Wednesday announced that it had bombed Hezbollah’s intelligence headquarters network in 60 different spots.

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Following a situation assessment, the IDF announced on Wednesday that it is remobilizing two reserve brigades for operations in the North.

The IDF said that recruiting additional reserve brigades would allow the fight against Hezbollah to continue.

The IDF also said that the operations would create conditions for the safe return of the north’s residents to their homes in accordance with the newly adopted war goal.

Shortly following the announcement, the IDF struck over 60 targets belonging to Hezbollah’s intelligence directorate, which it says were used to gather intelligence on Israeli maneuvers in the North.

In addition to the 60 intelligence targets, 280 launch sites and weapons depots were hit by airstrikes throughout the day after the targeting of towns across the Galilee.

This attack comes after several days of persistent Israeli strikes against Hezbollah targets across the south of the country and Beirut, including the huge communications devices explosion last week.

Strikes also hit areas of eastern Lebanon, in the Bekaa Valley, targeting weapons storage facilities.

Back and forth

In response, Hezbollah has attacked Israeli towns and villages in areas that they have not regularly been targeted during the war, including Nazareth.

On Wednesday morning, Hezbollah launched a ballistic missile at Tel Aviv at 6:30 a.m., followed by another attack on Zicron Yaakov later in the day.

Hezbollah is expanding the “equation” of its attacks from its usual targets on Israel’s border to include central Israel and areas further from the border, The Jerusalem Post‘s Yonah Jeremy Bob reported on Wednesday.

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IDF Northern Commander Maj. Gen. Uri Gordon on Wednesday told his forces that “we need to be very ready to go into action and to invade” Lebanon in the rising escalation against Hezbollah.

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Yariv Mozer, the director of We Will Dance Again, a documentary film about the Nova festival, said that he had to agree with the BBC to not describe Hamas as a terrorist organization if he wanted it to air, according to an interview with The Hollywood Reporter on Tuesday.

The film, which is set to broadcast on the BBC on Thursday, contains unseen footage of the Hamas massacre at the festival on October 7. It was commissioned by BBC Storyville.

Mozer told The Hollywood Reporter that this was a concession he had to make if he wanted the film to be seen by the British public.

“It was a price I was willing to pay so that the British public will be able to see these atrocities and decide if this is a terrorist organization or not,” Mozer said.

This comes amid claims of anti-Israel bias in the BBC since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war, including a scandal caused last week by British Lawyer Trevor Asserson’s report that the BBC breached its own editorial guidelines for news coverage more than 1,500 times since the beginning of the war.

Mozer added that he had offered the documentary to multiple streaming platforms in the US. However, they were reportedly unwilling to pick it up due to concerns about the political situation.

“The film isn’t political,” Mozer stated. “It’s told from the eyes of the survivors and from the eyes of Hamas. There is one truth about what happened.”

The documentary will still be shown in Australia, Spain and on Paramount+ in the United States.

Brutal details and footage

Speaking on the content of the film, and the deliberation over using graphic and violent footage, Mozer told the Reporter that he “wanted to keep as much as possible, to be able to show how enormous the scale of this attack was and the brutality of these atrocities against people who couldn’t defend themselves.” 

“A brutal fundamentalistic movement is obsessively looking to destroy the values of Western society. These were young people at a music festival celebrating life, love, and peace: very naïve and free-spirited. And they faced the most horrific people, who value death.”

The documentary is a minute-by-minute reconstruction. It begins with the run-up to the attack, which began at 6:30 a.m. on Saturday, October 7, and depicts the events using testimonies, videos, CCTV, GoPro footage from the Hamas live stream, and phone and dashcam footage.

The footage covers the six-plus hours that people tried to hide or escape from the terrorists. 

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The IDF used the “David’s Sling” system for the first time in an operational interception of a rocket launched from southern Lebanon over the skies of central Israel, Israeli media reported on Wednesday morning.

Despite identifying a single rocket targeting the center of the country, sirens sounded across multiple cities.

“Due to uncertainty about where it will land and risk of interception shrapnel, sirens may sound in more distant places,” former Defense Array System Commander Ilan Biton explained, according to KAN. 

The David’s Sling system, formerly known as the “Magic Wand,” is designed to intercept advanced threats, including ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, aircraft, and drones. The was jointly developed by the US and Israel under the directive of the “Homa” Missile Directorate at the Defense Ministry.

David’s Sling is intended to intercept very advanced threats, which is why the cost of each interceptor is very high, amounting to over one million dollars, Israeli media sites explained. About a year ago, the system intercepted a missile launched from the Gaza Strip toward central Israel.

David’s Sling is the third layer in the national missile and rocket defense system, above the future laser system “Iron Beam” and Iron Dome, and below the Arrow-2 and Arrow-3 missiles. The system was developed by Rafael and the American Raytheon.

Along the flight path of an aerial threat, there are  designated zones where the missile is expected to fall, according to KAN’s report. “Therefore, there are areas along the flight path where a siren may blare for a more distant area,” even though the interception may occur in an earlier zone along the missile’s path, explained Biton.

Hezbollah had intended to target a Mossad base near Tel Aviv, according to a report on Reuters on Wednesday. The attack was in response to Israel’s responsibility for assassinations of Hezbollah leaders, as well as blowing up pagers mid-September.

The missile which triggered the sirens in central Israel fell into the sea off the coast of Herzliya and Tel Aviv, Home Front Command announced. 

Finland’s $345M purchase

David’s Sling’s development began in 2006 with US funding, and the system began operating in 2016. Its interceptor missile has a unique structure, and it is equipped with a radar and an optical sensor. The control system was developed and supplied by Elbit. The radar was developed by Elta, which is a division of the Israel Aerospace Industries.

In 2018, two years after its introduction, David’s Sling failed in its first operational interception attempt, targeting two Syrian missiles. It is possible that due to that failure, the Air Force’s air defense system decided to use the system this time, to test it again and evaluate the improvements made to it.

In addition to Israel, one foreign customer purchased the defense system: Finland. The country bought David’s Sling as part of its efforts to enhance military readiness following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Finland announced in 2023 that it would purchase the system in a deal worth $345 million, with an option to increase it to $600 million.

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Hezbollah’s flexible chain of command, together with its extensive tunnel network and a vast arsenal of missiles and weapons it has bolstered over the past year, is helping it weather unprecedented Israeli strikes, three sources familiar with the Lebanese militant group’s operations said.

Israel’s assault on Hezbollah over the past week, including the targeting of senior commanders and the detonation of booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies, has left the powerful Lebanese Shiite militant group and political party reeling.

On Friday, Israel killed the commander who founded and led the group’s elite Radwan force, Ibrahim Aqil. And since Monday, Lebanon’s deadliest day of violence in decades, the health ministry says more than 560 people, among them 50 children, have died in air barrages.

The Israeli military chief of staff Herzi Halevi said on Sunday that Aqil’s death had shaken the organization. Israel says its strikes have also destroyed thousands of Hezbollah rockets and shells.

But two of the sources familiar with Hezbollah operations said the group swiftly appointed replacements for Aqil and other senior figures killed in Friday’s airstrike in Beirut’s southern suburbs. Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said in an Aug. 1 speech that the group quickly fills gaps whenever a leader is killed.

A fourth source, a Hezbollah official, said the attack on communication devices put 1,500 fighters out of commission because of their injuries, with many having been blinded or had their hands blown off.

While that is a major blow, it represents a fraction of Hezbollah’s strength, which a report for the U.S. Congress on Friday put at 40,000-50,000 fighters. Nasrallah has said the group has 100,000 fighters.

Since October, when Hezbollah began firing at Israel in October in support of its ally Hamas in Gaza, it has redeployed fighters to frontline areas in the south, including some from Syria, the three sources said.

It has also been bringing rockets into Lebanon at a fast pace, anticipating a drawn-out conflict, the sources said, adding that the group sought to avoid all out war.

Hezbollah’s main supporter and weapons supplier is Iran. The group is the most powerful faction in Tehran’s “Axis of Resistance” of allied irregular forces across the Middle East. Many of its weapons are Iranian, Russian or Chinese models.

The sources, who all asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter, did not provide details of the weapons or where they were bought.

Hezbollah’s media office did not reply to requests for comment for this story.

Andreas Krieg, a senior lecturer at the School of Security Studies at King’s College London, said that while Hezbollah operations had been disrupted by the past week’s attacks, the group’s networked organizational structure helped make it an extremely resilient force.

“This is the most formidable enemy Israel has ever faced on the battlefield, not because of numbers and tech but in terms of resilience.”

Powerful missiles

Fighting has escalated this week. Israel killed another top Hezbollah commander, Ibrahim Qubaisi, on Tuesday. For its part, Hezbollah has shown its capacity to continue operations, firing hundreds of rockets towards Israel in ever deeper attacks.

On Wednesday, Hezbollah said it had targeted an Israeli intelligence base near Tel Aviv, more than 100 km (60 miles) from the border. Warning sirens sounded in Tel Aviv as a single surface-to-surface missile was intercepted by air defense systems, the Israeli military said.

The group has yet to say whether it has launched any of its most potent, precision-guided rockets, such as the Fateh-110, an Iranian-made ballistic missile with a range of 250-300 km (341.75 miles). Hezbollah’s Fateh-110 have a 450-500 kg warhead, according to a 2018 paper published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Hezbollah’s rocket attacks are possible because the chain of command has kept functioning despite the group suffering a brief spell of disarray after the pagers and radios detonated, one of the sources, a senior security official, said.

The three sources said Hezbollah’s ability to communicate is underpinned by a dedicated, fixed-line telephone network – which it has described as critical to its communications and continues to work – as well as by other devices.

Many of its fighters were carrying older models of pagers, for example, that were unaffected by last week’s attack.

Reuters could not independently verify the information. Most injuries from the exploding pagers were in Beirut, far from the front.

Hezbollah stepped up the use of pagers after banning its fighters from using cellphones on the battlefield in February, in response to commanders being killed in strikes.

If the chain of command breaks, frontline fighters are trained to operate in small, independent clusters comprised of a few villages near the border, capable of fighting Israeli forces for long periods, the senior source added.

That is precisely what happened in 2006, during the last war between Hezbollah and Israel, when the group’s fighters held out for weeks, some in frontline villages invaded by Israel.

Israel says it has escalated attacks to degrade Hezbollah’s capabilities and make it safe for tens of thousands of displaced Israelis to return to their homes near the Lebanon border, which they fled when Hezbollah began firing rockets on Oct. 8.

Prime Minister Bejamin Netanyahu’s government has said it prefers to reach a negotiated agreement that would see Hezbollah withdraw from the border region but stands ready to continue its bombing campaign if Hezbollah refuses, and does not rule out any military options.

Hezbollah’s resilience means the fighting has raised fears of a protracted war that could suck in the U.S., Israel’s close ally, and Iran – especially if Israel launches, and gets bogged down in, a ground offensive in southern Lebanon.

Israel’s military did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian warned on Monday of “irreversible” consequences of a full blown war in the Middle East. A U.S. State Department official said Washington disagreed with Israel’s strategy of escalation and sought to reduce tensions.

Underground arsenal

In what two of the sources said was an indication of how well some of Hezbollah’s weapons are hidden, on Sunday rockets were launched from areas of southern Lebanon that had been targeted by Israel shortly before, the two sources said.

Hezbollah is believed to have an underground arsenal and last month published footage that appeared to show its fighters driving trucks with rocket launchers through tunnels. The sources did not specify if the rockets fired on Sunday were launched from underground.

Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said Monday’s barrage had destroyed tens of thousands of Hezbollah rockets and munitions.

Israel’s military said long-range cruise missiles, rockets with warheads capable of carrying 100kg of explosives, short-range rockets, and explosive UAVs were all struck on Monday.

Reuters could not independently verify the military claims.

Boaz Shapira a researcher at Alma, an Israeli think tank that specializes in Hezbollah, said Israel had yet to target strategic sites such as long-range missiles and drone sites.

“I don’t think we are anywhere near finishing this,” Shapira said.

Hezbollah’s arsenal is believed to compromise some 150,000 rockets, the U.S. Congress report said. Krieg said its most powerful, long-range ballistic missiles were kept below ground.

Hezbollah has spent years building a tunnel network that by Israeli estimates extends for hundreds of kilometers. The Israeli military said Monday’s air strikes hit Hezbollah missile launch sites hidden under homes in southern Lebanon.

Hezbollah has said it does not place military infrastructure near civilians. Hezbollah has issued no statement on the impact of Israel’s strikes since Monday.

Tunnels

The group’s arsenal and tunnels have expanded since the 2006 war, especially precision guidance systems, leader Nasrallah has said. Hezbollah officials have said the group has used a small part of the arsenal in fighting over the past year.

Israeli officials have said Hezbollah’s military infrastructure is tightly meshed into the villages and communities of southern Lebanon, with ammunition and missile launcher pads stored in houses throughout the area. Israel has been pounding some of those villages for months to degrade Hezbollah’s capabilities.

Confirmed details on the tunnel network remain scarce.

A 2021 report by Alma, an Israeli think tank that specializes in Hezbollah, said Iran and North Korea both helped build up the network of tunnels in the aftermath of the 2006 war.

Israel has already struggled to root out Hamas commanders and self-reliant fighting units from the tunnels criss-crossing Gaza.

“It is one of our biggest challenges in Gaza, and it is certainly something we could meet in Lebanon,” said Carmit Valensi, a senior research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, a think-tank.

Krieg said that unlike Gaza, where most tunnels are manually dug into a sandy soil, the tunnels in Lebanon had been dug deep in mountain rock. “They are far less accessible than in Gaza and even less easy to destroy.”

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Two people were wounded by shrapnel in Kibbutz Sa’ar after rockets were fired into the western Galilee, Magen David Adom’s (MDA) CEO Eli Bin reported on Wednesday afternoon.

The two wounded were a 35-year-old man in serious condition, with shrapnel wounds to his upper body, and a 52-year-old man in moderate conditio, MDA said. Both were taken to the Galilee Medical Center in Nahariya.

MDA added that several people were treated for anxiety.

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A rocket hit an assisted living facility in the Safed area, the IDF announced on Wednesday. No casualties were reported.

Following the rocket barrage, in which approximately 40 rockets were detected crossing from Lebanese territory towards the Upper Galilee area, some of which were intercepted, the IDF reported that one hit was reported in the Safed area.

Assisted living buildings are residential facilities that provide support for seniors or individuals with disabilities. They offer assistance with daily activities such as bathing, dressing, and medication management. These communities promote independence while ensuring access to care and social activities.

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There was a noticeable attempt to target a strategic facility of Israel Electric Corporation in one of the recent barrages from Lebanon, the electricity service provider announced on Wednesday.

“Thanks to the protective measures installed in advance, there is no damage to the site,” the statement added.

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The foreign ministers of Jordan, Egypt and Iraq condemned Israel’s aggression in Lebanon, saying Israel was “pushing the region towards a comprehensive war,” in a joint statement on Wednesday.

The three ministers met in New York on Tuesday, where they were attending the United Nations General Assembly.

The statement says that the regional escalation can be stopped by “halting the Israeli aggression in Gaza.”

“Israel bears full responsibility for this deterioration,” they stated, adding that it would “have serious repercussions for the entire region.

اجتمع وزراء خارجية كل من المملكة الأردنية الهاشمية وجمهورية مصر العربية وجمهورية العراق بتاريخ ٢٤ أيلول ٢٠٢٤ على هامش أعمال الدورة ٧٩ للجمعية العامة للأمم المتحدة في نيويورك.

وبحث الوزراء مسار العمل في إطار آلية التعاون الثلاثي، وذلك تحضيراً للقمة الثلاثية المرتقبة على مستوى… pic.twitter.com/X1KgGPzdlk

— وزارة الخارجية وشؤون المغتربين الأردنية (@ForeignMinistry) September 25, 2024

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