TEL AVIV, Israel — Rocket barrages fired from Lebanon killed seven people in northern Israel on Thursday, authorities said, hitting agricultural areas along the border and near the city of Haifa in back-to-back attacks that represented the deadliest spate of strikes from Lebanon since the Israeli military invaded the country in October.
Meanwhile, Israeli forces struck one of the last functioning hospitals in the besieged northern Gaza Strip on Thursday, destroying a stockpile of medical supplies delivered to the facility days ago by the World Health Organization, according to Palestinian officials and a spokesperson for the U.N. agency.
The Israeli military said it was “unaware of a strike” on Kamal Adwan Hospital but said it was reviewing the reports. Israeli troops withdrew from the hospital Monday after a three-day raid when they arrested most of the medical staff and two children died, Gaza health officials said. The military said the detainees were suspected of being fighters in the Iran-backed militant group Hamas.
The violence came as top U.S. diplomats were in the region to push for cease-fires in Lebanon and Gaza, hoping to end the Mideast wars in the Biden administration’s final months.
Lebanon’s Hezbollah militant group, also backed by Iran, has been firing thousands of rockets, drones and missiles into Israel, and drawing fierce Israeli retaliatory strikes, in the year since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack out of the Gaza Strip triggered Israel’s invasion and bombardment of the Palestinian enclave. Hezbollah did not immediately claim responsibility for Thursday’s rocket fire.
The fight on Israel’s northern border escalated into a full-blown war in September, when Israel launched a wave of heavy airstrikes across Lebanon that killed Hezbollah’s top leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and most of his deputies. Israeli ground forces pushed into Lebanon Oct. 1.
Some 1.2 million people in Lebanon have been displaced since Israel’s escalation in September. Hezbollah’s intensified rocket attacks into Israel have forced 60,000 Israelis to evacuate from communities near the border.
On Thursday, projectiles from Lebanon crashed into an agricultural area in Metula, Israel’s northernmost town, killing four foreign workers and an Israeli farmer. The residents of Metula evacuated in October 2023, and only security officials and agricultural workers remain.
The Hotline for Refugees and Migrants, an Israeli organization that advocates for foreign workers, said authorities had put them in danger by allowing them to work along the border without proper protection.
Hours later, the Israeli military reported another volley of some 25 rockets crossing into Israel from Lebanon, striking an olive grove in a suburb of the northern port city of Haifa.
Thursday’s second barrage killed a man, 30, and a woman, 60, said authorities in Israel.
The New York Times contributed.