Important Takeaways:
- Hezbollah fired more than 250 rockets into Israel on Wednesday after Israel killed Sami Taleb Abdullah, the most senior Hezbollah commander to be eliminated since October 7.
- This was the largest one-day rocket attack since the war began and included for the first time in this conflict rocket attacks as far south as Tiberias.
- The IDF said most rockets fell in open areas, some others were intercepted, and others fell in other locations.
- Al Mayadeen reported that a number of Israeli military sites, including the Mount Meron air traffic control base, were targeted during the attacks.
- Hezbollah said it carried out at least 17 operations against Israel on Wednesday, including eight in response to what it called the “assassination”.
- Abdallah was senior to Wissam Tawil, a high-level Hezbollah commander killed in an Israeli strike in January, said the sources in Lebanon, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
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Important Takeaways:
- “We are prepared for a very intense operation in the north. One way or another, we will restore security to the north,” Netanyahu said during a visit to the border area.
- Almost eight months of exchanges between Israel and the Iran-backed movement, a Hamas ally, have intensified over the past week, with Israel striking deeper into Lebanese territory.
- Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich have both called in recent days for urgent action to restore security to northern Israel.
- “They burn us here; all Hezbollah strongholds should also burn and be destroyed. WAR!” Ben Gvir said
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Important Takeaways:
- Fires started by Hezbollah rockets and drones ignited and spread throughout northern Israel early this week, posing a new challenge for the Israeli military and leading to public demands for action against the Iranian terror group.
- The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) issued a statement Monday evening:
- Over the past few hours, the IDF has been conducting a situational assessment with Israel Fire and Rescue Services to allocate additional means, forces, and firefighting capabilities in order to extinguish the fires in northern Israel.
- At this stage, IDF reserve soldiers, engineer tools, mechanical equipment, fire trucks, and fire tanks were reinforced.
- An IDF Home Front Command’s fire battalion is currently operating at the scene and assisting fire and rescue forces.
- The forces gained control over the locations of fire, and at this stage, no human life is at risk.
- The Commanding Officer of the Northern Command is currently arriving at the Kiryat Shmona Fire Station.
- Six IDF reservist soldiers were lightly injured as a result of smoke inhalation and transferred to a hospital to receive medical treatment. Their families have been notified.
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Important Takeaways:
- The Lebanese militant group Hezbollah this week struck a military post in northern Israel using a drone that fired two missiles. The attack wounded three soldiers, one of them seriously, according to the Israeli military.
- Hezbollah has regularly fired missiles across the border with Israel over the past seven months, but the one on Thursday appears to have been the first successful missile airstrike it has launched from within Israeli airspace.
- “Hezbollah has been escalating the situation in the north,” said military spokesman Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani. “They’ve been firing more and more.”
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Important Takeaways:
- Israel beefs up air defenses, calls up troops as Iran payback for Syria strike looms
- Speculation suggests Iran could attack Israel from its own territory rather than through proxies, sparking wider hostilities
- Both Iran and its proxy Hezbollah have vowed that Israel will not go unpunished for the Monday attack on a consular building next to Iran’s embassy in Damascus, which killed Mohammad Reza Zahedi, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ most senior official in Syria, along with his deputy, five other IRGC officers, and at least one member of the Hezbollah terror group.
- Zahedi was reportedly responsible for the IRGC’s operations in Syria and Lebanon, for Iranian militias there, and for ties with Hezbollah, and was thus the most senior commander of Iranian forces in the two countries.
- The IRGC is a US-designated terrorist organization.
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Important Takeaways:
- A Lebanese migrant who was caught sneaking over the border admitted he’s a member of Hezbollah, he hoped to make a bomb, and his destination was New York
- Basel Bassel Ebbadi, 22, was caught by the US Border Patrol on March 9 near El Paso, Texas
- Ebbadi said in a sworn interview after his arrest that he had trained with Hezbollah for seven years and served as an active member guarding weapons locations for another four years
- Ebbadi’s training focused on “jihad” and killing people “that was not Muslim,” he said.
- Border agents continue to see a surge in migrants whose names appear on the terror watchlist entering the US illegally as crossings continue at record levels.
- Border agents recorded 98 encounters with terror watchlisted individuals at both the northern and southern borders in fiscal year 2022, and almost twice as many, 172, in fiscal year 2023, which ends Sept. 30.
- So far, in the first four months of 2024, 59 people have been apprehended, according to federal data.
- “The federal government has failed to enact border security measures, and the state of Texas, through Gov. [Greg] Abbott’s Operation Lone Star, will continue to take unprecedented action to help secure the border,” DPS Lt. Chris Olivarez said.
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Important Takeaways:
- Israel’s foreign minister warned time’s running short to find a diplomatic solution to the presence of Hezbollah fighters along the country’s northern border with Lebanon.
- Hezbollah, a Shiite militant group backed by Iran, and Israeli forces have exchanged fire almost daily since the Israel-Hamas war erupted on Oct. 7. While those skirmishes have killed scores of people and forced almost 100,000 Israelis and thousands of Lebanese to evacuate their homes, neither side has escalated its operations.
- Israel has said, though, that it’s prepared to open another front with a military attack on southern Lebanon if Hezbollah doesn’t move back to about 20 miles (32 kilometers) from the border, as per the terms of a long-standing United Nations resolution.
- Hezbollah has expressed solidarity with Hamas and fired missiles, mortars and rockets into Israel. The Israeli military has responded with artillery fire and also assassinated senior Hezbollah figures.
- Hezbollah is the most powerful militia in the Middle East. It has an arsenal of more than 100,000 rockets and missiles, according to Israeli intelligence estimates, far bigger than what Hamas could muster before Oct. 7.
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Important Takeaways:
- As war creeps closer to Armageddon, the end of days doesn’t seem so far away
- From Megiddo’s hilltop, there is a great view of the West Bank, no more than two miles away.
- To the north, the rockets of Hezbollah – in total about 160,000 of them – are pointed in this direction while in the south, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are fighting raging gun battles with Hamas in a war that’s almost four months long.
- Israel is on edge. Standing in Megiddo, right in the middle of the country and now home to a vast archaeological site, there is a sense of foreboding that pervades the region.
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Important Takeaways:
- Israeli hospitals near Lebanon border preparing for ‘desert island’ scenarios
- A massive attack by Hezbollah could leave the medical centers for days without access to equipment, medicine or food, as well as staff in the reserves
- The Israeli Health Ministry ordered hospitals in the north to be ready to receive thousands of wounded, under extraneous conditions, as fighting intensifies on Israel’s border with Lebanon, according to a report by Kan.
- The Ziv Hospital in Safed and the Galilee Medical Center in Nahariya started preparing for what has been described as a “desert island” situation, meaning days without equipment, medicines or food in the event of a massive Hezbollah attack.
- The hospitals in Safed and Nahariya have also been instructed to prepare for the transfer of patients to other medical centers. Furthermore, the Health Ministry advised an increased vigilance and preparedness in all hospital systems and health insurance funds across the country.
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Important Takeaways:
- How Israel’s war with Hamas is spiraling across the Middle East: As terror group’s deputy leader is killed in Beirut drone strike and targets are hit in Syria, fears grow of much wider regional conflict
- Israel’s assassination of Hamas deputy leader Saleh al-Arouri in a drone strike in Lebanon’s capital Beirut on Tuesday has raised fears that the war in Gaza could spread beyond the Palestinian enclave and engulf the Middle East.
- Arouri, 57, was the first senior Hamas political leader to be assassinated since Israel launched a brutal air and ground offensive against the group almost three months ago on the heels of the ruthless October 7 attacks on Israeli towns.
- Lebanon’s heavily armed Hezbollah group, a powerful Hamas ally, previously vowed to strike back against any Israeli targeting of Palestinian officials in Lebanon, and said of the attack: ‘This crime will never pass without response and punishment.’
- Hezbollah and the Israeli military have been exchanging fire almost daily over the Israeli-Lebanese border since Israel’s military campaign in Gaza began, but so far the Lebanese group has appeared reluctant to dramatically escalate the fighting.
- A significant response now could send the conflict spiraling into all-out war on Israel’s northern border.
- Meanwhile, Nasser Kanaani, spokesperson for the foreign ministry of Iran – the chief backer of Hamas and Hezbollah – said Arouri’s killing would ‘undoubtedly ignite another surge in the veins of resistance and the motivation to fight against the Zionist occupiers.
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