Hezbollah launched more than 100 rockets at Israel, causing injuries and damaging buildings, as well as setting cars on fire

More than 100 rockets were fired by Hezbollah from Lebanon, with some landing near the northern city of Haifa, the Israeli military said on Sunday.

The rockets hit a larger area further from Israel’s northern border than previous rounds and triggered air raid sirens across the region. The Israeli military said rockets had been fired “towards civilian areas,” pointing to a possible escalation after the attacks had mostly targeted military targets.

The Magen David Adom rescue service said it had treated Four people with shrapnel woundsincluding a 76-year-old man who suffered moderate injuries near Haifa, where he had Damaged buildings and burning carsIt was not immediately clear whether the damage was caused by a rocket or an Israeli interceptor.

The attack followed an Israeli airstrike in Beirut that killed at least 37 people, including one of the leaders of the Lebanese political and military group, as well as women and children. The group had already suffered a blow from a sophisticated attack using thousands of personal explosive devices a few days earlier.

The Israeli military said it had struck 400 militant targets in southern Lebanon in the past 24 hours, including rocket launchers. Israeli forces also raided the West Bank office of Al Jazeera early Sunday, which was banned in Israel earlier this year on charges of serving as a mouthpiece for armed groups. The pan-Arab broadcaster has denied the allegations.

Israel and Hezbollah have been locked in fire since the Gaza war began nearly a year ago, when the militant group began firing rockets in solidarity with Palestinians and Hamas, which like the Lebanese group receives Iranian support. Low-level fighting has left dozens dead in Israel, hundreds in Lebanon and displaced tens of thousands of people on both sides of the border.

Neither side is widely believed to be seeking war. However, tensions have steadily risen in recent weeks, with Israel shifting its attention from Gaza to Lebanon and vowing to bring calm to the border so its citizens can return home. Hezbollah has said it will only stop its attacks if there is a ceasefire in Gaza, something that looks increasingly unlikely as protracted negotiations led by the United States, Egypt and Qatar have successively bogged down.

The war in Gaza began with the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, in which Palestinian militants killed about 1,200 people and took about 250 hostages. They are still holding about 100 people, of whom a third are believed to have died. Gaza’s health ministry says about 41,000 Palestinians have been killed, and while it does not detail how many were fighters, it says half of the dead were women and children.

Israeli media said rockets fired from Lebanon on Sunday were intercepted in the Haifa and Nazareth areas, further south than the areas hit by rocket fire so far. Israel cancelled classes across the north, adding to the sense of crisis.

Hezbollah said it had launched dozens of Fadi 1 and Fadi 2 missiles, a new class of weapon the group had not used before, at the Ramat David airbase southeast of Haifa “in response to repeated Israeli attacks that hit several Lebanese regions and led to the downfall of many civilian martyrs.”

In July, the group released a video of what it described as spy drone footage of the base.

Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate against Israel for a wave of explosions on Tuesday and Wednesday on pagers and walkie-talkies of members of the political and military group. At least 37 people were killed, including two children, and some 3,000 were wounded. The attacks were widely blamed on Israel, which has neither confirmed nor denied responsibility.

An Israeli airstrike on Friday flattened an eight-story building in a densely populated neighborhood in Beirut’s southern suburbs as Hezbollah members were meeting in the basement, Israel said. Among the dead was Ibrahim Akil, a prominent Hezbollah leader who led the group’s special forces unit, known as the Radwan Force.

At least seven women and three children were killed in Friday’s attack on the building, Lebanese Health Minister Firass Abiad told reporters on Sunday. Another 68 people were wounded, he said, of whom 15 were hospitalized.

It was the deadliest attack on Beirut since a bitter 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, and the death toll could rise because 23 people were still missing, a government official said.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said the operation had broken Hezbollah’s chain of command and eliminated Akil, who was responsible for Israeli deaths.

Akil had been on the U.S. most-wanted list for years with a $7 million bounty for his alleged role in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut and the kidnapping of American and German hostages in Lebanon during the country’s civil war in the 1980s.

With information from Reuters.