Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah said his group’s large-scale attack on Israel on Sunday targeted a military intelligence base near Tel Aviv and denied Israel destroyed thousands of the group’s rockets launchers. Israel launched air strikes into Lebanon on Sunday, saying it destroyed “thousands” of Hezbollah rocket launchers and thwarted a major attack, while Hezbollah said it delivered a drone and rocket barrage of its own. The “main target for the operation” inside Israel was “the Glilot base — the main Israeli military intelligence base”, around 100 kilometres (60 miles) from the Israel-Lebanon border, Nasrallah said in a televised speech. The Israeli army said Hezbollah failed to strike the installation. “I can confirm that there were no hits at the Glilot base,” a spokesperson for the Israeli military told AFP. According to Israeli media reports, the base hosts headquarters of the Mossad spy agency, which has never revealed its address. “Talk about how the resistance (Hezbollah) was going to launch 8,000 or 6,000 rockets and drones and that (Israel) thwarted this… are false claims”, Nasrallah said, adding that only “dozens of rocket launchers” were destroyed. Nasrallah said his group carried out a two-phased attack, firstly launching “340 Katyusha rockets” at 11 Israeli military positions in northern Israel and the annexed Golan Heights. Then, drones launched from south Lebanon but also from east Lebanon’s Bekaa valley near the Syrian border for the first time targeted positions deeper in Israel, Nasrallah added. He said the secondary target was an Israeli base in Ein Shemer, alleging that a number of drones reached their target “but the enemy is silent”. Ein Shemer is a military airport used for Israeli drones, about 70 kilometres from the border. Hezbollah has traded near-daily cross-border fire with Israeli forces throughout the Gaza war, saying its attacks are in support of Palestinian ally Hamas. But fears of a wider regional conflagration soared after attacks in late July blamed on Israel killed Iran-aligned leaders, including a top Hezbollah commander, Fuad Shukr, prompting vows of revenge. The Lebanese movement said earlier Sunday its attack was an “initial response” to Shukr’s killing. Nasrallah appeared to suggest the retaliation was over, saying that “if the result is satisfactory and the sought objectives accomplished, we think the response operation” to Shukr’s killing “has been accomplished”.
