STORY: Israel’s biggest municipalities shut down its Mediterranean beaches on Sunday (August 25) as tourists and local residents said they were taking precautions in the wake of extraordinary exchange of missile fire between Israel and Hezbollah.
Tel Aviv and Haifa’s city halls, as well as other coastal towns, announced they were closing their beaches after the Israeli military told people to limit gatherings.
Disappointed tourists and residents took elsewhere, but the restrictions were lifted several hours later, authorities said, as the cross-border fire abated.
Earlier in the day, Hezbollah launched hundreds of rockets and drones at Israel, as Israel’s military said it struck Lebanon with around 100 jets to thwart a bigger attack, in one of the biggest clashes in more than 10 months of border warfare.
The streets of the northern port city of Haifa appeared empty on Sunday, but residents said “there was no panic.”
“We don’t want war. You only lose in a war,” said 57-year-old Haifa resident, Miri Brent who sat with a friend at a relatively empty cafe.
Any major escalation in the fighting, which began in parallel with the war in Gaza, risks morphing into a regional conflagration drawing in Hezbollah’s backer Iran and Israel’s main ally the United States.
The Iran-backed Lebanese group said it had fired 320 Katyusha rockets towards Israel and hit 11 military targets in what it called the first phase of its retaliation for Israel’s assassination of Fuad Shukr, a senior commander, last month.
Israel’s military said it had foiled a much larger attack with pre-emptive airstrikes after assessing that Hezbollah was preparing to launch the barrage, using 100 jets to strike more than 40 Hezbollah launch sites in southern Lebanon.
The strikes destroyed thousands of launcher barrels, aimed mostly at northern Israel but also targeting some central areas, Israel’s military said.
Hezbollah dismissed Israel’s statement that the group’s attack had been foiled with pre-emptive strikes, saying it had been able to launch its drones as planned and that the rest of its response to Shukr’s killing would take “some time”.
Expectations of an escalation had risen since a missile strike in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights last month killed 12 youngsters and the Israeli military assassinated Shukr in Beirut in response.
