Israel hit by second round of rockets from Lebanon
The were no injuries or damage, the Israeli military says. But there is worry that militants are maneuvering to open a new front in the fighting.
Reporting from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem — Rockets from Lebanon smashed into northern Israel today, provoking a counterattack by Israeli artillery units and sending civilians running for bomb shelters.
It was the second such attack in less than a week. Although the Israeli military said the rockets injured no one and damaged nothing, they revived concerns that militants might try to open a new front to distract Israel from its war on Gaza.
There was no claim of responsibility for the rockets, which landed near the town of Kiryat Shemona. Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed guerrilla group that fought a monthlong war with Israel in 2006, had denied involvement in the earlier attack.
In Gaza, the Israeli military said its warplanes and helicopter gunships hit at least 60 targets early today, including more than 30 weapons-smuggling tunnels from Egypt.
A broad coalition of Israeli human-rights groups today decried the toll the fighting has taken on Gaza's civilians and suggested war crimes could be involved.
The fighting has weakened the military power of Hamas, and its political leadership is divided over plans for a possible cease-fire. But an Israeli intelligence official said Tuesday that the radical group remained dangerous, with 15,000 fighters, tunnels and a sophisticated arsenal of rockets and antitank weapons.
The senior official's assessment was delivered in a news briefing on a day when Israeli ground forces and Hamas militants battled in a neighborhood of high-rise apartments in southeastern Gaza City. Civilians fled as Israeli units, backed by shelling from warships near the seaside enclave, edged deeper into the city but appeared to stop short of Hamas strongholds.
Israel's push into the Tal al Hawa neighborhood of Gaza City, about a mile from the city center, increased pressure on Hamas fighters and on humanitarian groups and hospitals trying to cope with rising numbers of homeless and wounded Palestinians. More than 971 Gazans, including 311 children and 76 women, had been killed and 4,418 wounded in 18 days of fighting, according to the United Nations.
Israeli forces invaded Tal al Hawa "and started to shell from the sky and from the ground," said Khader Dahdouh, whose home was badly damaged in fighting that began after midnight and lasted until dawn. "The resistance fighters were firing rocket-propelled grenades, and the soldiers took cover in nearby villas."
