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Israel’s wars with Iran-backed groups grind on with rockets killing 7 in Israel, IDF airstrikes in Syria
Tel Aviv, Israel — Rocket fire from Lebanon killed at least seven people in northern Israel on Thursday, including four foreign workers, in the deadliest of such attacks since Israel’s invasion earlier this month. The attacks on two separate locations came as senior U.S. diplomats were in the region to push for cease-fires in Lebanon and Gaza, hoping to wind down the raging wars between Israel and Iranian-backed groups in the Middle East in the Biden administration’s final months.
The Hezbollah militant group in Lebanon has been firing rockets, drones and missiles into Israel daily, and drawing retaliatory strikes, since Hamas launched its Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attack from the Gaza Strip, triggering the war there.
Hezbollah and Hamas are ideological allies and both have long been deemed Iranian proxy groups — and designated as terrorist organizations by the U.S., Israel and many other countries.
Israel’s military said Thursday, meanwhile, that it had carried out airstrikes on targets near Qusair, a city in western Syria near the border with Lebanon, where it claimed Hezbollah had recently started storing weapons in an attempt to smuggle them into Lebanon. The Israel Defense Forces have struck border crossings between Lebanon and Syria multiple times, claiming they served as arms-smuggling routes.
Reports from Syrian news outlets said at least five people were killed in the Thursday strikes.
The conflict along Israel’s northern border escalated last month when the IDF launched a wave of heavy airstrikes across Lebanon and killed Hezbollah’s top leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and most of his deputies. Israeli ground forces then pushed into Lebanon at the start of October. Almost two dozen Israel forces have been killed in Lebanon since then, while Lebanese health authorities say the airstrikes have killed about 2,000 people across the country.
Amir Levy/Getty
The Metula regional council in northern Israel reported Thursday’s first rocket attack, which killed five people, without detailing the number or type of projectiles used.
The nationalities of the four workers killed in that attack were also not immediately known. Metula, Israel’s northernmost town, is surrounded by Lebanon on three sides and it has suffered heavy damage from rockets. The town’s residents evacuated in October 2023, and only security officials and agricultural workers remain there.
The Hotline for Refugees and Migrants, an organization that advocates for foreign workers, said authorities had put them in danger by allowing them to work along the border without proper protection. Agricultural areas along Israel’s border, where much of the country’s orchards are located, are closed military areas that can only be entered with official permission.
AHMAD GHARABLI/AFP/Getty
Not long after that strike, Magen David Adom, Israel’s main emergency medical organization, said medics had confirmed the deaths of a 30-year-old man and 60-year-old woman in a suburb of the northern city of Haifa. They also treated two other people who suffered mild injuries and were hospitalized. The Israeli military said roughly 25 rockets crossed into Israel from Lebanon as part of that volley, which struck an olive grove where people had gathered for the harvest.
Hezbollah’s newly named top leader, Sheikh Naim Qassem, said in a video statement Wednesday that the militant group would keep fighting Israel until it is offered cease-fire terms it deems acceptable. He said it has recovered from a series of setbacks in recent months, including attacks using explosive pagers and walkie-talkies that were widely blamed on Israel.
“Hezbollah’s capabilities are still available and compatible with a long war,” he said.
Earlier Thursday, the Israeli military warned people to evacuate from more areas of southern Lebanon, as airstrikes in different parts of the country killed eight people, according to Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency. Israel has warned people to evacuate from large areas of the country, including major cities in the south and east.
More than 2,800 people have been killed and nearly 13,000 wounded in Lebanon since the conflict began more than a year ago, and some 1.2 million people have been displaced from their homes, according to the Lebanese government.
SAM SKAINEH/AFP/Getty
In Israel, rockets, missiles, and drones launched by Hezbollah have killed at least 68 people, about half of them soldiers. More than 60,000 Israelis from towns and cities along the border have been evacuated from their homes for more than a year.
The U.S. and other mediating nations have been circulating new proposals to wind down the regional conflicts during the Biden administration’s final months. Negotiations on both fronts have been stalled for months and none of the warring parties have shown any sign of backing down from their demands.
Senior White House officials Brett McGurk and Amos Hochstein were both back in Israel Thursday for talks on possible cease-fires and the release of hostages held by Hamas. CIA Director Bill Burns was to visit Egypt to discuss those efforts.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with McGurk and Hochstein, his office confirmed in a statement, saying the Israeli leader had “thanked our American friends for their efforts” but “clarified that the main issue is not the paperwork of this or that agreement, but only Israel’s determination to enforce the agreement and thwart any threat to its security from Lebanon.”
One proposal to end the war between Israel and Hezbollah calls for a two-month cease-fire during which Israeli forces would withdraw from Lebanon, and Hezbollah would end its armed presence along the country’s southern border, two officials familiar with the talks told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
But Israel is unlikely to trust U.N. peacekeepers and Lebanese troops — both of whom it accuses of failing to prevent Hezbollah from entrenching in the area over the last decade — to keep Hezbollah out of a buffer zone it has now reestablished in southern Lebanon. It wants the freedom to strike the militants if needed. Lebanese officials want a complete withdrawal.
Separately, the U.S., Egypt and Qatar have proposed a four-week cease-fire in Gaza during which Hamas would release up to 10 hostages, according to an Egyptian official and a Western diplomat.
But Hamas still appears unwilling to release scores of hostages without securing a more lasting cease-fire and a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, even after the killing of its top leader, Yahya Sinwar. Prime Minister Netanyahu has insisted on lasting Israeli control over parts of the territory.
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The discovery of a 4,000-year-old fortified town hidden in an oasis in modern-day Saudi Arabia reveals how life at the time was slowly changing from a nomadic to an urban existence, archaeologists said on Wednesday.
The remains of the town, dubbed al-Natah, were long concealed by the walled oasis of Khaybar, a green and fertile speck surrounded by desert in the northwest of the Arabian Peninsula.
Then an ancient 14.5 kilometer-long wall was discovered at the site, according to research led by French archaeologist Guillaume Charloux published earlier this year.
For a new study published in the journal PLOS One, a French-Saudi team of researchers have provided “proof that these ramparts are organized around a habitat,” Charloux told AFP.
The large town, which was home to up to 500 residents, was built around 2,400 BC during the early Bronze Age, the researchers said.
Charloux et al., 2024, PLOS One
It was abandoned around a thousand years later. “No one knows why,” Charloux said.
When al-Natah was built, cities were flourishing in the Levant region along the Mediterranean Sea from present-day Syria to Jordan.
Northwest Arabia at the time was thought to have been barren desert, crossed by pastoral nomads and dotted with burial sites.
That was until 15 years ago, when archaeologists discovered ramparts dating back to the Bronze Age in the oasis of Tayma, to Khaybar’s north.
This “first essential discovery” led scientists to look closer at these oases, Charloux said.
“Slow urbanism”
Black volcanic rocks called basalt concealed the walls of al-Natah so well that it “protected the site from illegal excavations,” Charloux said.
But observing the site from above revealed potential paths and the foundations of houses, suggesting where the archaeologists needed to dig.
They discovered foundations “strong enough to easily support at least one- or two-story” homes, Charloux said, emphasizing that there was much more work to be done to understand the site.
But their preliminary findings paint a picture of a 2.6-hectare town with around 50 houses perched on a hill, equipped with a wall of its own.
Tombs inside a necropolis there contained metal weapons like axes and daggers as well as stones such as agate, indicating a relatively advanced society for so long ago.
Pieces of pottery “suggest a relatively egalitarian society,” the study said. They are “very pretty but very simple ceramics,” added Charloux.
The size of the ramparts — which could reach around five meters (16 feet) high — suggests that al-Natah was the seat of some kind of powerful local authority.
These discoveries reveal a process of “slow urbanism” during the transition between nomadic and more settled village life, the study said.
For example, fortified oases could have been in contact with each other in an area still largely populated by pastoral nomadic groups. Such exchanges could have even laid the foundations for the “incense route” which saw spices, frankincense and myrrh traded from southern Arabia to the Mediterranean.
Al-Natah was still small compared to cities in Mesopotamia or Egypt during the period.
But in these vast expanses of desert, it appears there was “another path towards urbanization” than such city-states, one “more modest, much slower, and quite specific to the northwest of Arabia,” Charloux said.
