Hezbollah claims to have fired a missile at Mossad headquarters near Tel Aviv

ISRAEL – The escalation continues in the Middle East. Lebanese Hezbollah announced on Wednesday, September 25, that it had fired a ballistic missile at Israel for the first time in nearly a year of violence, claiming to have targeted the headquarters of Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, near Tel Aviv.

In a statement, the powerful pro-Iranian movement said it had “launched a Qader 1 ballistic missile at 6:30 a.m. Wednesday (…) targeting the Mossad headquarters in the suburbs of Tel Aviv”.

Hezbollah added that the Mossad headquarters was “responsible for the assassination of leaders” you Hezbollah “and explosions of pagers and walkie-talkies”.

For its part, the Israeli army announced that it had intercepted the missile fired from Lebanon. “Following the sirens that sounded in the Tel Aviv and Netanya areas, a surface-to-surface missile was identified coming from Lebanon and was intercepted by the air defense.”a military spokesman said.

Several hard blows for Hezbollah

“This is the first time that a Hezbollah missile has reached the Tel Aviv area. It was intercepted.” by the Israeli army, an army spokesman added to AFP.

This is the first time since the start of violence between Israel and Hezbollah, the day after the start of the war in Gaza on October 7, 2023, that the Iranian-armed group has announced that it has launched a ballistic missile at Israel.

Since Monday, intense Israeli strikes have targeted its strongholds in southern and eastern Lebanon as well as in the southern suburbs of Beirut, killing at least 558 people.

The attacks came after several major blows to Hezbollah in the past week: deadly explosions hit the movement’s communications equipment, and an Israeli strike killed 55 people, decapitating its elite force, al-Radwan, whose leader Ibrahim Aqil was killed.

On Tuesday evening, another Hezbollah military leader, Ibrahim Mohammed Kobeissi, was killed in an Israeli strike on the southern suburbs of Beirut.