Hezbollah representatives in Lebanon claimed that the attack on the northern Israeli port city of Haifa was in response to the indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas in Lebanon by Israeli forces for the last three days, which has resulted in over 100 civilians killed.
Meanwhile, the Israeli military issued alerts to all Israeli citizens who are in or north of Tel Aviv to be ready for possible evacuation if the rocket attacks from Lebanon continue.
Israeli sources stated that at least five rockets hit the city, located 35 km south of the Lebanon-Israel border, and the furthest south that rockets fired from Lebanon have ever hit. The rockets were aimed mainly at the train station and economic installations along the Haifa Bay.
The sources added that at least 17 people were wounded in the strike, six seriously and four moderately. Those wounded in the depot were taken to Rambam Medical Center in Haifa.
In a statement read by representatives of the Hezbollah resistance movement in Lebanon, they stated, "After the enemy continued all night their destructive shelling of [Beirut’s] southern suburb and other areas… the resistance movement fired dozens of rockets on Haifa. The Islamic resistance at 9:45 AM rained again on Haifa with a new salvo of Raad-2 and Raad-3 rockets".
The Hezbollah representatives added that if the Israel Air Force continues its strikes on Beirut, the group would target petrochemical plants in Haifa, saying that in this morning’s strike, they had deliberately avoided the plants, but warning that, "the next time, we will not spare anything in Haifa and its surroundings."
The rockets that have been fired into northern Israel by Hezbollah in the last several days have numbered more than 700, according to Israeli military sources, killing at least 10 people. At the same time, over 100 Lebanese civilians have been killed by Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon, including 23 evacuees killed yesterday in an air strike on a bus convoy of people headed north for safety.
The violence between the two nations was sparked by a six-month long siege by Israel on the Palestinian Gaza Strip, and an invasion of the Gaza Strip by Israel on June 25th when Palestinian resistance fighters took an Israeli soldier prisoner. After two weeks of Israeli forces attacking the undefended people of Gaza, taking out bridges, power plants, government buildings and infrastructure, and 76 Palestinians killed, the Lebanese resistance movement, Hezbollah, carried out a solidarity attack in the north of Israel on Wednesday June 12th, killing seven Israeli soldiers and taking two prisoner. Israeli forces, considering the attack ‘an act of war’, have been bombarding southern Lebanon, as far north as Beirut, in the days since Wednesday.
