UN says Israeli tanks burst into peacekeeper base: 67 Israelis wounded in Hezbollah drone attack

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM/ NEW YORK: An Israeli volunteer rescue service on Sunday said more than 67 people were wounded south of Haifa, where Hezbollah earlier claimed a drone strike that targeted a military base.

“With the help of United Hatzalah ambulance teams, we provided assistance to over 60 wounded people with varying degrees of injuries — critical, serious, moderate and mild,” the rescue service United Hatzalah said in a statement posted on its Facebook page.

Earlier Sunday, Lebanese group Hezbollah, which is at war with Israel, said it launched “a squadron of attack drones” at a military training camp in Binyamina, south of Haifa, in response to Israeli air strikes on the country.

The incident comes two days after air raid sirens sounded in central Israel after two aerial drones entered the country from Lebanon, with at least one building damaged north of Tel Aviv during the incident.

Hezbollah has been regularly firing rockets and drones across the border into Israel for more than a year, but has reached further since late September when fighting escalated.

Israel’s sophisticated air defences, including the Iron Dome system, has intercepted most of the projectiles, with few casualties caused by strikes or falling debris.—AFP

Reuters adds: The United Nations said on Sunday Israeli tanks had burst through the gates of a base of its peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon, the latest accusation of Israeli violations and attacks denounced by its own allies.

The UNIFIL peacekeeping force said two Israeli Merkava tanks destroyed the main gate of a base and forcibly entered before dawn on Sunday morning. After the tanks left, shells exploded 100 metres (yards) away, releasing smoke which blew across the base and sickened UN personnel, it said in a statement.

In its version of events, the Israeli military said group of the Iran-backed group Hezbollah had fired anti-tank missiles at Israeli troops, wounding 25 of them. The attack was very close to a UNIFIL post and a tank helping evacuate the casualties under fire then backed into the UNIFIL post, it said.

“It is not storming a base. It is not trying to enter a base. It was a tank under heavy fire, mass casualty event, backing up to get out of harm’s way,” the military’s international spokesperson Nadav Shoshani told reporters.

In a statement, the military said it used a smoke screen to provide cover for the evacuation of the wounded soldiers but its actions posed no danger to the UN peacekeeping force. The UN force said any deliberate attack on peacekeepers was a grave violation of international humanitarian law.

On Sunday, Hezbollah said it attacked a camp of the Israeli military’s Golani Brigade camp in Binyamina in northern Israel with a “swarm of drones”. Israel’s N12 News television said at least 67 people were wounded and the head of the ambulance service told N12 that four people were in critical condition.

Earlier on Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement addressed to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres: “The time has come for you to withdraw UNIFIL from Hezbollah strongholds and from the combat zones.”