Four soldiers have been killed, and dozens were wounded to various degrees of severity by a Hezbollah drone that hit the area of Binyamina on Sunday evening. Throughout the day in Lebanon, around 25 IDF soldiers were wounded in multiple incidents.
Concerning the drone strike, per MDA and the IDF spokesperson, four people were killed, with an additional seven being seriously wounded, and dozens more moderately or lightly wounded without need for hospitalization. Helicopters evacuated them to the Sheba Medical Center in Tel Hashomer, the Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, the Hillel Yaffe Medical Center in Hadera, the Emek Medical Center in Afula, the Rabin Medical Center-Beilinson Campus in Petah Tikva, and the Laniado Hospital in Netanya.
The attack came soon after restrictions were lifted in a number of areas that overlapped with the region that was targeted.
Two UAVs were launched from Lebanon under the cover of a Hezbollah rocket barrage toward Israel. One was shot down at sea, but one penetrated the defense systems and exploded on land. No warning sirens were activated, an incident that the IDF is set to probe.
In Lebanon, two soldiers battling Hezbollah forces earlier on Sunday in Lebanon were seriously wounded. The two, a reservist soldier and a combat officer, served in Battalion 9220 in the 6th Brigade. An additional 23 were moderately or lightly wounded. Seventeen were brought to the Galilee Medical Center in Nahariya, while four were airlifted to Rambam, and another four were hospitalized at Sheba.
These attacks follow Hezbollah’s claim on Sunday morning that the terrorist group hit an IDF unit near Zar’it with missiles – including a Burkan missile – and reported a direct hit. Earlier on Sunday, a rocket was fired at Metulla and exploded in an open area.
In a progression of the war against Hezbollah, the IDF on Sunday announced that it carried out 200 airstrikes against targets across Lebanon over the last 24 hours. The military maintained that four divisions were dismantling the terrorist group’s infrastructure in southern Lebanon. However, the army has been unsuccessful in substantially reducing rocket fire on the home front, so far.
Yom Kippur
Over Yom Kippur, Hezbollah repeatedly pounded Israel with over 150 rockets, sending one million Israelis into safe rooms and bomb shelters, and striking a residential area in Herzliya with a drone.
While no one was killed by those rockets, three people were wounded, and – two weeks into the IDF’s invasion of southern Lebanon – there are still no signs that the increased military pressure is dramatically reducing the rocket fire to ensure one of Israel’s primary goals in the war: Returning the northern residents home.
The IDF added on Sunday afternoon that 115 more projectiles were fired by Hezbollah and crossed into Israeli territory.
In a conversation with The Jerusalem Post, senior IDF officials in southern Lebanon on Thursday did not even say that part of their mission was to reduce rocket fire. Rather, they narrowed it exclusively down to eliminating Hezbollah’s ability to invade northern Israel with the Radwan Force’s ground troops.
The IDF said on Sunday that Division 146 killed over 100 Hezbollah fighters and destroyed dozens of their tunnels in southern Lebanon.
Other military sources have said that Hezbollah’s rocket arsenal is down around 50-70%, but given that its pre-war arsenal was around 150,000, there is no reason why it could not continue rocket fire of 50-200 rockets per day indefinitely – as it has recently done.
In addition, the IDF has maxed out most of Hezbollah’s “valuable” targets – three top level of commanders – such that Sunday’s description of targets was more of a generic list: Rocket cells, anti-tank cells, and rank-and-file Hezbollah fighters.
In Gaza, the IDF attacked 40 Hamas targets and killed dozens of terrorists in the last 24 hours, it said. Division 162 destroyed Hamas weapons, grenades, and mines in Jabalya in northern Gaza, where it began an operation – the fourth invasion of that area – last week.
Further, the IDF said that it destroyed the rocket firing cell, which had fired two rockets at Ashkelon on Yom Kippur.
The IDF still has not confirmed that it is rolling out a version of the plan – by Brig.-Gen. Giora Eiland and hundreds of mid-level reservist officers – to evacuate all Palestinian civilians from northern Gaza and completely cut Hamas off from that area. In practice, however, it has seemed to substantially carry out such a policy.
Though numbers are still rough, it is already possible that a majority of the 150,000-250,000 Palestinian civilians who were in northern Gaza last week have already been moved to southern or central Gaza.
On the other hand, military sources said that some were still being allowed to return from southern Gaza to those parts of northern Gaza that have not yet been evacuated, such as Zeitun, Shejaia, and Daraj Tuffah.
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant put an emphasis on IDF ground operations in southern Lebanon in recent weeks, while assessing the situation in the North on Sunday: “The first line of villages is a military target, with thousands of weapons and missiles and hundreds of tunnels. These places will be destroyed, and even after the departure of IDF soldiers, we will not allow Hezbollah to return here.”