Hezbollah’s Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah announced that his party had targeted successfully an Israeli military intelligence base near Tel Aviv with drones as part of its major attack on Israel on Sunday morning.
The “main target of the operation” was “Glilot, the main Israeli military intelligence base, where the spy unit 8200 is located, 110 km from the border,” said Nasrallah in a televised address.
In addition to Glilot, Hezbollah targeted the Ein Shemer air force base, 70 km from the border, he said.
The Hezbollah leader also denied Israel’s “false allegations” about the destruction of rocket launchers in a spate of air raids that Israel claimed were a preemptive action.
“The claims that the resistance was going to launch 8,000 or 6,000 rockets and drones, and that Israel thwarted this operation are unfounded and false allegations,” he said.
He specified that his Iranian-backed group had launched its large-scale attack in two stages. First, Hezbollah fired “340 Katyusha rockets” at eleven military targets in northern Israel and the occupied Golan Heights in order to jam the Iron Dome and clear the way for the drones.
Then drones, launched from southern Lebanon but also for the first time, according to him, from the Bekaa plain in eastern Lebanon, bordering Syria, targeted military objectives in depth, he added.
An Israeli army spokesman assured AFP that the military intelligence base, which according to Israeli media also houses the headquarters of Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, “was not hit”.
Israel claimed early on Sunday to have thwarted a large-scale Hezbollah attack by carrying out multiple strikes in Lebanon.
Hezbollah, for its part, announced that it had launched hundreds of drones and rockets on Israel to avenge the death of its top military leader, Fouad Shokr, killed in an Israeli strike on the southern suburbs of Beirut on July 30.
Nasrallah hinted that the attack dubbed “Operation Arbaeen” had been completed: “If the result is satisfactory and accomplishes the desired objectives, we will consider that the operation of retaliation” for the assassination of Shokr “has been accomplished”, but if it is deemed insufficient, “we will reserve the response for another time.”
