Hamas’s armed wing, the al-Qassam brigades, said its fighters in southern Lebanon were behind the shelling of the northern Israeli town of Kiryat Shmona, where four rockets landed in an industrial area, injuring two people and damaging buildings.
In a second barrage, Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia militant group, said it had simultaneously attacked 19 positions in Israel on Thursday evening in the latest escalation on Israel’s northern border.
Thursday’s exchanges came before a speech by Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary general of Hezbollah, in Beirut on Friday that will be closely watched in Israel and across the region. Hezbollah, like Hamas, is a proxy of Iran.
Earlier, Hezbollah said it had used two drones packed with explosives to attack an Israeli army command position in the disputed Shebaa Farms area on the Lebanese-Israeli border.
It is the first time Hezbollah has acknowledged carrying out an attack against Israeli forces using such drones, and comes a few days after it said for the first time it had used a surface-to-air missile against an Israeli drone.
In a statement, Hezbollah said the drones filled with “a large quantity of explosives” had attacked the headquarters of the Israeli battalion in the Shebaa Farms area and hit their targets.
Israel has held the Shebaa Farms, a 15-square-mile area of land, since the 1967 war; Syria and Lebanon claim the area belongs to Lebanon.
Hezbollah fighters have been exchanging fire with Israeli forces across the Israeli-Lebanese border since 7 October, when Hamas massacred about 1,400 Israelis, in the deadliest escalation at the frontier since a 2006 war.
The escalating frictions on the northern border have prompted the large-scale evacuation of the area, where drones can be heard flying constantly over almost deserted towns and communities to the sound of intermittent booms of Israeli artillery fire.
With the clashes so far mostly contained to the frontier, Hezbollah has used only a fraction of the firepower that Nasrallah has been threatening with Israel for years.
According to some estimates, about 50 Hezbollah fighters have died in exchanges in which it has tried to target Israeli positions with anti-tank missiles.
Despite the fighting, analysts have assessed that Israel and Hezbollah are both attempting to avoid the situation escalating out of control, with Hezbollah not yet using its longer-range rockets, of which it has a huge arsenal, but instead targeting positions it can see from across the border.
Nasrallah’s anticipated speech – his first comments since the 7 October attacks – has raised the stakes, with Israel’s most senior officer warning on Thursday that less than half of its air forces were being used in Gaza, with considerable fire power available for threats on other borders.
Lt Gen Herzi Halevi, the head of the Israel Defence Forces, said Israel was ready to fight on several fronts and to “immediately execute” an operation against Hezbollah in Lebanon if necessary. “Israel did not start a war against Hezbollah and I do not recommend to anyone to start a war with us,” he said.
A complication, according to some analysts, is that Hezbollah sees any prospect of an Israeli victory against Hamas in Gaza as containing the risk that Israel may turn against it next.
“I believe Hezbollah … views this conflict as an existential one,” Mohanad Hage Ali, an expert on Lebanon with the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, told Al Jazeera this week. “They think that if Israel manages to meet its objectives in eradicating Hamas in the Gaza Strip, then they will turn around and deal with what they see as the Hezbollah threat.”
Nasrallah is a leading voice in a regional military alliance established by Iran to counter the US and Israel, known as the Axis of Resistance. It includes Shia Iraqi militias who have been firing at US forces in Syria and Iraq, and Houthis from Yemen who have joined the conflict by firing drones at Israel.
While Nasrallah has kept out of the public eye, other Hezbollah officials have indicated the group’s combat readiness while not setting any red lines in the conflict with Israel.
The Hezbollah politician Hassan Fadlallah said Nasrallah was following the situation in Gaza “moment by moment and hour by hour” and overseeing the battle in Lebanon. As “part of his management of the battle”, Nasrallah had not until now spoken in public, he said.
