Hezbollah fires 40 rockets in 'preliminary response' to Israeli attack: no casualties reported

Hezbollah released a statement claiming responsibility for the attack on northern Israel in the vicinity of Mount Meron in Upper Galilee, explicitly targeting the military facilities of the Israeli Defence Forces.

According to Hezbollah's statement, this rocket attack served as a "preliminary response" to Israel's attack on the suburbs of Beirut, during which Saleh al-Arouri, one of the leaders of Hamas, was killed on Tuesday.

In a televised speech on Friday, Hasan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, vowed that the killing of al-Arouri "will not go unanswered."

The ongoing clashes at the Lebanese-Israeli border have escalated since the start of Israel's conflict with Hamas. Lebanon views this as a "historic opportunity" to reclaim its "territories occupied by the Jewish state". Similarly, the "Iraqi Islamic resistance movement" sees this as a crucial chance to put an end to the US presence in Iraq," said the leader of Hezbollah, a powerful militant organization and influential Shiite political party in Lebanon.

Arouri is reputed as the mastermind behind the "Al-Aksa flood", a massacre in Israel on October 7, as dubbed by Hamas. He was the Deputy Head of Hamas's Political Bureau and centrally involved in organizing terrorist attacks on the West Bank.

The Israeli armed forces have already retaliated to this strike. The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) announced that it had demolished the "terrorist cell" deemed responsible for the rocket attacks.