Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s vacation home in the city of Caesarea was hit by a drone strike, a spokesman said.
Israel launched several airstrikes in the southern suburbs of Beirut after Lebanese armed group Hezbollah fired rockets into northern Israel from a drone targeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s vacation home.
Netanyahu’s spokesman said one of three drones launched from Lebanon struck Netanyahu’s home in the city of Caesarea on Saturday, adding that he was not nearby and that there were no casualties.
Two other drones were intercepted, the Israeli military said, and a total of more than 100 rockets were fired from Lebanon across northern Israel, killing one person and injuring at least 13 others.
Iran-aligned Hezbollah has been exchanging fire with Israel since October last year.
Al Jazeera’s Noor Odeh reports from Amman, Jordan that Israeli authorities are treating the attack on Netanyahu’s home as an “assassination attempt”.
“Of course, there’s no way to verify it or say for sure that it was an assassination attempt, but that’s how seriously the Israeli security establishment is taking this incident,” he said.
“A drone flew undetected 70 km from the Lebanese border, without sounding any sirens, before it hit its intended target, causing great concern in Israel and the Israeli defense establishment.”
“A large number of rockets” from Lebanon were used as decoys to launch drone strikes on Netanyahu’s home, he said. He said sirens were activated across northern Israel, including the cities of Galilee and Haifa.
Haifa is the largest city in northern Israel and is considered a strategic port city with a population of 300,000 and the country’s naval headquarters.
“The sirens went off immediately after we confirmed that the drone strike was indeed successful in targeting the Israeli prime minister’s home in Caesarea,” Ode said.
Israeli attacks
Later on Saturday, the Lebanese Health Ministry said four people were killed and 13 wounded in an Israeli airstrike on an apartment building in the eastern town of Baaloul, West Bekaa.
Israeli airstrikes also hit southern suburbs of Beirut, Lebanese state media said, marking the first attacks in the area in three days, shortly after Israel ordered residents to evacuate.
Footage from the news agency AFP showed smoke rising from the area less than an hour after the Israeli army issued the evacuation order.
Lebanon’s official national news agency reported two Israeli strikes on a single building in the neighborhood of Haret Hreik, and later said “Israeli warplanes” struck the al-Umara neighborhood in nearby Choueifat.
Israeli military spokesman Avichay Adraee issued an urgent warning to “residents of the southern suburbs (Dahiyeh), especially… those in the Haret Hreik neighborhood.”
“You are close to facilities and interests belonging to Hezbollah, against which the IDF (Israeli Army) will act in the future,” he wrote in Arabic on X.
He later issued warnings to the Burj al-Barrajneh and Choueifat neighborhoods.
On September 23, Israel launched an intensive air campaign over Lebanon and then sent ground troops after cross-border exchanges with Hezbollah over the Gaza war.
At least 1,418 people have died in the war in Lebanon since late September, according to an AFP tally of Lebanese health ministry statistics, although the actual number may be higher.
