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Hezbollah launched a stream of attack drones into northern Israel on Tuesday, in what the armed group said was a response to an Israeli strike a day earlier that the Israeli military said had killed a field commander in Hezbollah’s elite Radwan force. The tit-for-tat attacks are further ratcheting up anxiety in a region bracing for retaliation for twin strikes that killed Hamas and Hezbollah leaders last week.
An Israeli airstrike in southern Lebanon killed five people on Tuesday, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry; Israel said it had hit structures used by Hezbollah. Several hours later, Hezbollah said it had fired drones toward Israeli military sites north of the Israeli city of Acre.
Seven people were wounded in the attacks, including a driver in critical condition who had been struck by shrapnel and subsequently crashed his car, according to Israeli paramedics. The Israeli military said some civilians in Israel were injured by an Israeli interceptor missile that missed its target.
Attacks between Israel and Hezbollah have been going on since the beginning of the war in Gaza, but tensions are particularly high as the region awaits a potentially huge Iran-led response to the assassination of a senior Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran, as well as to the killing of Fuad Shukr, a top Hezbollah military commander, last week in Beirut.
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Iran and its proxies — which include Hamas and Hezbollah — have vowed to retaliate for the killings, prompting a frenzy of speculation of how and when they will attack. Diplomats have rushed to try to prevent the escalation from spilling into a potentially devastating war.
Abdallah Bou Habib, the Lebanese foreign minister, told reporters on Tuesday that Lebanese officials had sought to discuss an appropriate response with Hezbollah that would not prompt war. But after the attack in Tehran, the decision was “bigger than Lebanon,” he said.
“We are working so that any response does not bring us to total war,” Mr. Bou Habib said at a news conference in Egypt. “That would not benefit any states, nor would it benefit Israel.”
In the meantime, the volatility at the border was keeping Israelis on alert. On Tuesday, air-raid sirens blared as far south as Acre, over nine miles from the border with Lebanon.
Hezbollah began firing on Israel from Lebanon on Oct. 8, in the wake of the Hamas-led attack that set off the war in Gaza. In response, Israel has repeatedly struck in Lebanon, and over 150,000 people have fled their homes on both sides of the border.
Diplomats and analysts have repeatedly warned that a miscalculation could lead the situation to spiral out of control, risking a more serious escalation. Fears rose in late July, after a rocket from Lebanon landed in a crowded soccer pitch in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights, killing 12 children and teenagers and wounding dozens.
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Israel and the United States blamed Hezbollah, which denied responsibility for the attack. Around the same time, however, Hezbollah said in a statement that it had fired on a nearby Israeli military base in the Golan Heights.
Days later, an Israeli airstrike hit a building in southern Beirut, killing Mr. Shukr, and an explosion in Tehran later killed Mr. Haniyeh. Israel has declined to comment publicly on Mr. Haniyeh’s death, but U.S. officials have privately confirmed its involvement.
The supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has promised “harsh punishment” for the killing of the Hamas leader in Tehran. In April, after an Israeli strike targeting senior Iranian generals in Damascus, Iran fired 300 missiles and drones at the country, most of which were intercepted or failed to hit their targets.
Some analysts have said that revenge attacks could also come in part from Iranian-backed groups in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Over 500 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank over the past 10 months, many of them in clashes with Israeli forces.
On Tuesday, Israeli forces raided Palestinian areas in the West Bank, killing 11 people, including a 14-year-old boy, according to Palestinian officials. Five were killed in an Israeli aerial attack on a car in Jenin, according to the Palestinian Authority Health Ministry. The Israeli military said its airstrikes had targeted “armed terrorist cells.”
— Aaron Boxerman and Euan Ward reporting from Jerusalem and Beirut, Lebanon
Key Developments
Palestinians imprisoned in Israeli detention facilities since the Oct. 7 attacks have been subjected to inhumane conditions and abuse that amount to systematic torture, B’Tselem, a well-respected Israeli rights monitor, said in a new report. The group’s investigators collected testimonies from 55 Palestinians jailed by Israel who said they were held in overcrowded cells, where they received little food and water and often faced physical abuse, sleep deprivation and occasionally sexual violence.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Israeli national security minister, whose office oversees the prison service, has said “worsening the conditions of terrorists in prisons” to the legal minimum is “one of the highest goals I have set for myself.” A spokeswoman for the prison service said that it operated according to the law, and that the report’s accusations had not been formally filed with the authorities. The New York Times reported in June that detainees at an Israeli military base had described beatings and other abuse there.
Antony J. Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, discussed efforts to reduce escalating tensions in the Middle East with Badr Abdelatty, the Egyptian foreign minister, on Monday, Matthew Miller, a State Department spokesman, said in a statement. Mr. Blinken said that an agreement for a cease-fire in Israel’s war in Gaza was “of the highest priority to the United States,” according the statement.
Josep Borrell Fontelles, the European Union’s top diplomat, also reiterated a call for an immediate cease-fire. He wrote on X in a post on Tuesday: “Tensions keep escalating in the Middle East, bringing it on the brink of a war of unknown proportions.”
A top Russian security official met in Tehran on Monday with senior officials as Iran prepared to retaliate against Israel for the killing of Hamas’s political leader on Iranian soil last week. The Russian official, Sergei K. Shoigu, met with Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, and with the commander of the Iranian armed forces, Brig. Gen. Mohammad Bagheri, who is leading the planning for military strikes on Israel.
A rocket attack targeting U.S. personnel housed at a base in Iraq’s western desert injured several American troops late on Monday, according to U.S. defense officials.
The attack on Ain al Asad Air Base resembled previous ones carried out by Iran-backed Iraqi armed groups, which have targeted the base repeatedly over the past several years but intensified their attacks after Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza began in October.
The latest attack involved at least two rockets that hit inside the base’s perimeter, according to a U.S. official and Iraqi witnesses near the site of the attack. The base had been targeted at least twice in the past three weeks, and there was also an attack late last month on a small U.S. base in eastern Syria where U.S. special operation forces work with Syrian Kurdish troops to tamp down the Islamic State.
Initial reports were that at least five people were injured in Monday’s attack and that the wounded included both U.S. troops and contractors.
The attack comes as tensions are running especially high in the region, with Israel and its American, European and regional allies bracing for a reprisal attack from Iran in response to the killings last week of a Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran, and a Hezbollah leader, Fuad Shukr, in the southern suburbs of Beirut.
Israel has said it carried out the attack on Mr. Shukr but has said nothing about the one in Iran. Iranian officials and Hamas have said that Israel was responsible for Mr. Haniyeh’s killing.
The Iranian government has said that any retaliatory attack will also involve its proxy forces, which include Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen and militants in Iraq.
Those Iraqi militants have typically attacked U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria and targeted Israel using longer-range rockets. The region has been on high alert for a broad onslaught, similar to Iran’s attack on Israel in April, which was in response to Israel’s killing of three senior leaders of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps and four other Revolutionary Guard officers in Damascus, Syria.
It was not clear if the rocket attack on Monday at Al Asad Air Base was part of that response or a continuation of ongoing efforts by the Iran-backed groups in Iraq to target U.S. forces, who are stationed in the country at the invitation of the Iraqi government. The chief goal of Iran-backed groups in Iraq is to force the U.S. troops to leave the country entirely. No group has taken responsibility for Monday’s attack.
There is continuing negotiation between senior defense officials in Iraq and the Pentagon over how to reconfigure and downsize the U.S. and multinational forces, but they have not yet reached a decision. Within the Iraqi government, there is division, with factions close to Iran pushing for a speedy U.S. departure while others, including many Iraqi defense officials, are pushing for limited longer-term U.S. involvement.
There are about 2,500 American troops in Iraq, as well as 900 in Syria, where the Islamic State has once again become active.
The White House said in a statement that President Biden and Vice President Kamala D. Harris had been briefed on the attack and had discussed steps that the administration would take “to defend our forces and respond to any attack against our personnel in a manner and place of our choosing.”
After a July 16 drone attack on the U.S. area of the Ain al Asad base, which did not result in injuries, the U.S. military bombed a small drone factory in Jurf al Sakhar, an area south of Baghdad, which serves as a base for the Iranian-backed group Kata’ib Hezbollah and others. The U.S. attack killed four fighters — three Iraqis and a Houthi commander — at the site.
— Alissa J. Rubin and Helene Cooper Alissa J. Rubin reported from Erbil, Iraq, and Helene Cooper from Washington.
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U.N. investigators cleared 10 employees of a Palestinian refugee agency in Gaza accused of taking part in the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, but nine others were fired because of possible involvement, the United Nations said.
The investigators found evidence that the employees “may have been involved” in the attack, which set off the war in the Gaza Strip, the U.N. said. It said they had been fired “in the interests of the agency.”
The investigation’s conclusion appeared to bring to a close, for now at least, a controversy that began after Israel leveled the alarming accusations in January against the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA. The allegations led dozens of donor nations to suspend hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for the agency, threatening to hobble its aid operations in Gaza.
With 13,000 staff members in the embattled territory, UNRWA has been key to efforts to provide shelter, food and other basic services to Gazans during nine months of war that has displaced most of the territory’s 2.2 million people. Tens of thousands have been killed, according to Gaza’s health authorities.
In recent months, most donor nations have resumed funding for the agency, citing its critical role in delivering aid to desperate Gazans, as well as the results of a separate U.N. investigation into UNRWA’s adherence to U.N. neutrality rules that was released in April. But one of its biggest funders, the United States, has not done so. U.S. lawmakers in March blocked all donations for one year.
In a statement on Monday, the agency’s head, Philippe Lazzarini, acknowledged the investigators’ findings and said that the nine employees who were deemed to have possibly participated in the attack “cannot work for UNRWA.”
“I reiterate UNRWA’s condemnation of the 7 October attack in the strongest possible terms,” he said.
The Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, dismissed the report as “a disgrace,” calling it “too little and too late.” In a post on social media, Mr. Erdan accused the investigators of ignoring evidence Israel had provided and called for the agency to be shut down.
Mr. Lazzarini said the agency’s priority was to “continue lifesaving and critical services” for Palestinian refugees in Gaza and elsewhere in the Middle East, “especially in the face of the ongoing war, the instability and risk of regional escalation.”
Israel initially accused 12 UNRWA workers of involvement in the Oct. 7 attack, in which about 1,200 people were killed. In later months, seven other cases were added.
The investigation found no evidence against one of those employees and insufficient evidence against nine others, the U.N. said on Monday.
The Israeli accusations came against the backdrop of decades of friction with UNRWA, which the United Nations General Assembly created in 1949 to care for those displaced in the war surrounding Israel’s creation. More than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were forced from their homes in what became Israel, and the agency grants refugee status to them and their descendants, who now number nearly six million.
Although it has no official role in resolving the refugees’ plight, Palestinians have long seen it as their protector, and as proof that world powers remain invested in their fate.
Many Israelis, however, argue that the agency perpetuates the conflict by encouraging the belief in a Palestinian “right of return” to what is now Israel. That, critics say, would amount to a demographic threat that would destroy the Jewish state.
In addition to its accusations against individual staff members, Israeli officials have charged that UNRWA in Gaza has been deeply infiltrated by members of Hamas and other militant groups, an allegation agency officials deny.
The investigation whose results were released on Monday did not examine that broader issue, only looking into the allegations of involvement by individual employees in the Oct. 7 attack.
The earlier investigation, whose results were released in April, found that UNRWA had strong protocols for ensuring its neutrality but made a range of recommendations for how it could do better.
