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It was Iran’s second direct attack on Israel after a missile and drone attack in April in response to a deadly Israeli air strike.
Iran launched around 180 missiles at Israel on Tuesday in response to the killings of Tehran-backed militant leaders, prompting alarm across the region and vows of retaliation.
Most of the missiles were intercepted by Israeli air defences or by allied air forces before they reached Israel.
“Missiles were launched from Iran towards the State of Israel,” the Israeli military said in a statement, as sirens sounded nationwide, announcing after about an hour that the attack was over with a “large number” of missiles intercepted.
Israeli medics reported two people were lightly injured by shrapnel in the country’s centre, while in the occupied West Bank, a Palestinian was killed in Jericho “when pieces of a rocket fell from the sky and hit him”, the city’s governor Hussein Hamayel told AFP.
It was Iran’s second direct attack on Israel after a missile and drone attack in April in response to a deadly Israeli air strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said they had launched a missile attack on “three military bases” around Israel’s commercial hub Tel Aviv.
They said the attack was in response to Israel’s killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah last week as well as the death of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in a Tehran bombing widely blamed on Israel.
UN chief Antonio Guterres condemned the “broadening conflict in the Middle East”, saying in a statement: “This must stop. We absolutely need a ceasefire.”
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the Iranian attack was “unacceptable” and called on the whole world to condemn it.
Israeli airspace was closed for several hours with all flights diverted, a spokesman for the airport authority said.
Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan, which lie between Iran and Israel, closed their airspace too.
As the missiles made their way to Israel from the east, blasts were heard over the Jordanian capital Amman, as Israel’s allies moved to intercept them, an AFP correspondent said.
the border”.
Later, as Iran launched missiles, celebratory gunfire erupted from Hezbollah’s bastion in Beirut’s southern suburbs.
In Gaza, the civil defence agency said Israeli bombing killed 19 people on Tuesday.
Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures that include hostages killed in captivity.
Israel’s retaliatory military offensive has killed at least 41,638 people in Gaza, most of them civilians, according to figures provided by the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry. The UN has described the figures as reliable.
AFP
