Suspected explosives-laden drone slams into field near Lower Galilee community
No injuries as projectile strikes near Arbel near Sea of Galilee, causing crater; Israeli jets strike Hezbollah targets in Lebanon
A drone suspected of carrying explosives slammed into an open area near the Sea of Galilee on Monday, leaving a hole in a field but causing no injuries.
The Israel Defense Forces said the drone was likely not an Israeli military UAV, meaning it may have been launched from Lebanon by Hezbollah or from Syria or Iraq by another Iran-backed terror group.
“The circumstances of the incident are under investigation,” the IDF said.
Images posted to social media showed a small crater in the ground in a field outside the Lower Galilee community of Arbel, as well as what appeared to be part of the suspected bomb-laden projectile.
Local authorities said there were no injuries.
Sappers were dispatched to the scene, police said.
The suspected drone attack took place some 30 kilometers from Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, far deeper inside Israel than most attacks launched by Hezbollah, which have largely targeted the border region and Upper Galilee.
The IDF said it struck several Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon’s Dhayra on Monday morning, and over the past day hit rocket-launching positions in Aitaroun and other Hezbollah infrastructure in Odaisseh in southern Lebanon.
It also carried out an airstrike on a building in Ayta ash-Shab where a Hezbollah operative was spotted entering.
Hezbollah claimed a series of attacks on northern Israel throughout Sunday, including an anti-tank guided missile that struck the entrance to the northern community of Shtula.
Since October 8, Hezbollah-led forces in Lebanon have attacked Israeli communities and military posts along the border on a near-daily basis, with the group saying it is doing so to support Gaza amid the war there. This has led to Israeli retaliations and regular cross-border fire, and has displaced tens of thousands of Israelis in border communities.
Israel has warned it will no longer tolerate the presence of Hezbollah along the Lebanon frontier, where it could attempt to carry out an attack similar to the massacres committed by Hamas on October 7.
It has warned that a failure of international diplomacy to force Hezbollah away from the border will necessitate an Israeli offensive.
France has delivered a written proposal to Beirut and Israel aimed at ending hostilities and settling the disputed Lebanon-Israel frontier, but there are few signs that those efforts will bear fruit in the immediate term.
Hezbollah signaled on Friday it would escalate attacks on Israel in response to the deaths of 10 Lebanese civilians killed in Israeli strikes on terror targets last week following a barrage fired at an Israeli military base near the northern city of Safed that killed a soldier.
In a televised speech, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said Israel would pay a price “in blood,” indicating the risk of an intensification of the conflict that has been rumbling across the Lebanese-Israeli border since the Gaza war erupted in October.
In a signal that it was prepared for any escalation, the Israeli military released a statement on Friday saying that its ground forces were “training on terrain that simulates the northern borders in winter weather conditions.”
Iran-backed groups in Syria and Iraq have largely halted attacks on US soldiers stationed in the Middle East since a deadly strike on a base in late January, after carrying out dozens of such assaults, also in apparent support of Hamas in Gaza.
The freeze on attacks against the US by Iraq’s Kataib Hezbollah and other came after the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force warned the group of harsh American retaliation, Reuters reported Sunday.
