Live Updates: Israel Downs Hezbollah Missile Aimed at Tel Aviv

Israel’s attacks continued on Wednesday, with Lebanon’s health ministry saying that a strike north of Beirut, the capital, had killed three people and injured nine others. The identities of those killed were not immediately available.

The strikes have spread panic and desperation across Lebanon and displaced roughly 500,000 people, according to Abdallah BouHabib, Lebanon’s foreign minister. Civilians have clogged the main roads leading to Beirut, while some from the capital have sought safety in the mountains and farther north.

On Tuesday, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military’s chief spokesman, told reporters that Israel was striking with such “high intensity” because it wanted to have “as short a campaign as possible.”

Here’s what else to know:

• Intense air raids: In recent days, Israel has unleashed on Lebanon some of the heaviest aerial attacks in the history of modern warfare, outpacing the bombardment of Gaza during the opening days of the Israel-Hamas war last October, war experts said. Strikes on Monday alone killed more than 550 people and injured another 1,800, one of the highest daily death tolls of any recent global war, and Lebanon’s deadliest day since its 15-year civil war ended in 1990.

• Israel’s strategy: Israel has achieved many of its short-term goals against Hezbollah during the last week, according to current and former senior Israeli officials. But they also said there was no clear further strategy to bring calm to northern Israel, from which tens of thousands of people have fled their homes in the months of cross-border attacks by Hezbollah.

• Targeting commanders: The Israeli military said it had killed a senior Hezbollah commander in an airstrike in Beirut on Tuesday, the latest blow in what appears to be a concerted Israeli attempt to take out the group’s leadership. Hezbollah later confirmed the death of Ibrahim Mohammed Qobeisi, a senior commander who oversaw its missile apparatus.

• Focus on Gaza: The families of Israeli hostages in Gaza fear their loved ones will be forgotten as Israel’s attention and military resources turn to the escalating conflict in the north. Dozens of the roughly 250 hostages taken by Hamas in its Oct. 7 attacks remain captive in the Gaza Strip. The Israeli authorities have declared that more than 30 hostages are presumed dead in Gaza.

Video circulating on social media and verified by The New York Times shows a plume of smoke rising in Al-Maaysra.

Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group, said in a statement that it had launched a ballistic missile targeting the headquarters of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, in the suburbs of Tel Aviv. The group said the attack was in retaliation for the assassination of its leaders and the explosion of pagers and radios that incapacitated many of its members.

A spokesman for the Israeli military, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, said the attack marked the first time the group had taken aim at Tel Aviv, Israel’s economic center. The missile had been headed toward civilian areas, rather than the Mossad headquarters, before it was intercepted, he told reporters in a news briefing.

“They’re trying to shoot more and farther in,” he said. “This morning, they were able to shoot farther in, the first time in history to Tel Aviv.”

Those attacks last week targeting Hezbollah leaders were followed by a barrage of Israeli airstrikes against the group in Lebanon since Monday that has killed more than 500 people, according to Lebanese authorities. The attacks have brought the two sides closer to all-out war than at any time since the start of the war in Gaza last October.

The Israeli military said its air force had struck the launcher from which the missile was fired, in the town of Nafakhiyeh in southern Lebanon.

After the Hamas-led attacks last October sparked the war in Gaza, Hezbollah began firing on Israel in solidarity with its Palestinian ally. In the year since, Israel and Hezbollah have been trading attacks, driving over 160,000 people from their homes near the border in both countries.

But Tel Aviv in central Israel has been largely sheltered from the conflict. As recently as Saturday, families were flocking to beaches and businesses were bustling in the city, 70 miles from the border with Lebanon.

Since Sunday, Hezbollah has launched more than 500 missiles, rockets and drones into Israel, most of which were intercepted. The group has appeared undeterred by the string of attacks by Israel last week.

Hezbollah, which many analysts consider the most powerful of the Iranian proxy groups and the biggest military threat to Israel, has spent years building military capacity since its war with Israel in 2006. The group was estimated to possess between 120,000 and 200,000 rockets and missiles before Israel’s strikes this week.

That set up a dizzying week of attacks in Lebanon. Israel blew up electronic devices distributed by Hezbollah, killing dozens of people and injuring thousands more. It then assassinated a group of its military leaders in an airstrike near Beirut. On Monday, a wave of Israeli airstrikes targeting parts of the country where Hezbollah holds sway killed hundreds of people.

The intensified attacks against Hezbollah reflect the opinion of some hawkish generals and others who think that the group can be forced to back down, the officials said, while others in the government believe Israel must first come to a deal on a cease-fire and hostage deal with Hamas before turning to another battleground. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has opposed a truce that would allow Hamas to survive the war.

The decision to escalate was met with strong opposition from some senior officials, according to three current and former officials who spoke to The Times. They worried that such actions, the officials said, could lead to all-out war with face-to-face fighting and questioned how they would pave the way for the return of Israelis to the north.

Hezbollah has been targeting northern Israel with rockets and drones since last year in solidarity with Hamas and its war against Israel in Gaza. Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, has said the group will not agree to stop firing at Israel until Israel and Hamas reach an agreement that ends the war in Gaza.

The Israeli military says that Mr. Qobeisi planned the abduction of three Israeli soldiers in 2000; their bodies were later returned to Israel in a prisoner exchange.

Israel has stepped up efforts to assassinate Hezbollah’s top leaders in recent weeks as part of a campaign to compel the Iranian-backed militant group to stop firing rockets and drones at Israel. For nearly a year, Hezbollah has been attacking Israel in solidarity with Hamas in Gaza, displacing tens of thousands of Israelis from border communities.

The campaign against the top echelon in Hezbollah comes after months of attacks that, Israeli military analysts said, have somewhat degraded Hezbollah’s military capabilities.

Over the past two months, Israel has killed at least two members of Hezbollah’s top military decision-making body, the Jihad Council, and tried to assassinate another.

In July, an Israeli airstrike in Beirut’s southern suburbs killed Fuad Shukr, one of the leaders of Hezbollah’s military operations and a confidante of the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah. That attack was a reprisal for a rocket attack from Lebanon that killed 12 children in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights.

Last Friday, Israeli forces flattened a residential building in an airstrike targeting Ibrahim Aqeel, another top Hezbollah leader, alongside several other leaders of the group’s commando unit. At least 55 people were killed in the strike, including several children and other noncombatants.

And on Monday, Israel tried to assassinate a third member of the Jihad Council, Ali Karaki, with an airstrike in Beirut. Hezbollah has denied that Mr. Karaki was killed and has said he had been taken to a “safe place” in the wake of the strike.

War death tolls are estimates, and exact comparisons between conflicts are difficult. But the toll on Monday in Lebanon exceeded most daily tolls in Gaza over the past year and more than doubled the average daily death rate during the deadliest year of the Syrian civil war.

Here’s what else to know.

The number of targets struck by Israel

The Israeli military said it hit more than 1,600 targets in Lebanon on Monday, a number that has few, if any, precedents in 21st-century warfare, according to Emily Tripp, the director of Airwars, a British conflict monitor.

It is roughly 300 more than the number of targets Israel struck during the opening three days of its Gaza offensive after the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7 — a number that itself was considered unusually high.

During the U.S.-led air campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria between 2014 and 2017, Western fighter jets struck an average of 650 targets a month across a much wider area, according to data published by the Department of Defense.

“Prior to the Gaza war, munitions deployed with this intensity and with this frequency would have been almost unheard-of,” Ms. Tripp said. “There is no comparison in terms of death toll or munitions use with previous 21st-century air campaigns of this nature, as far as we know.”

The Israeli military said Hezbollah fired 250 rockets toward Israel on Monday, most of which were intercepted by Israeli air-defense missiles or missed their targets. At least one man was reported to have been wounded by shrapnel. Since October, Hezbollah has fired more than 8,000 missiles toward Israeli positions, according to the Israeli military.

How the Lebanese death toll compares

The Lebanese health minister, Dr. Firass Abiad, said 558 people were killed on Monday in Israeli strikes — an unusually high number by the standards of contemporary war, experts said.

In Gaza last October, it took 18 days for the reported daily death toll to exceed 500. The Monday toll is about half the entire casualty count during the monthlong Israel-Hezbollah war of 2006. And it is far higher than the average daily toll during the Syrian war in 2014, the deadliest year of that decade-long conflict.

How the Lebanese government collates the death toll

Lebanon’s health ministry runs an emergency operations center that collects casualty numbers from private and state-run hospitals, collating them to create a national toll from the war, according to health officials.

These figures have historically been viewed as reliable and are cited regularly by the United Nations, which helped the ministry develop the operations center.

Hezbollah, the powerful Shiite militia backed by Iran, does not run the ministry. It is overseen by the government of Lebanon, whose members are split along sectarian and political lines.

Dr. Abiad, a former board chairman at Lebanon’s largest hospital, is generally considered apolitical and won praise and prominence for his data-driven assessments during the coronavirus pandemic. He was first proposed for the role of health minister by Saad Hariri, a Sunni former prime minister who is not allied with Hezbollah, and was formally appointed by Mr. Hariri’s successor.

The ratio of slain combatants to civilians

The Lebanese health ministry does not provide detailed breakdowns of the numbers of civilians and combatants killed. But Dr. Abiad said in a brief phone interview on Tuesday that the “overwhelming majority, if not all,” of those killed and injured on Monday were civilians.

For his statement to be true, the number of civilian men killed in Lebanon on Monday would need to overwhelmingly exceed the combined number of slain women and children. The Lebanese health ministry said that 94 women and 50 children were killed on Monday, or just over 25 percent of the total death toll, but it did not specify the number of slain male civilians.

The Israeli military has said it was targeting military operatives, weapons caches and rocket launchers, many of them hidden in civilian neighborhoods and homes.

Ms. Tripp said the number of slain women and children was “consistent with what we’ve seen in conflicts such as Iraq, but lower compared to the recent Gaza war.”

In Gaza, more than 54 percent of the roughly 34,000 people recently named as victims by the Gaza health authorities were said to be either women or boys and girls under 18. Roughly 7,000 other victims are still to be identified by the health authorities, according to the ministry’s chief statistician.

Lauren Leatherby contributed reporting.

After nearly a year, roughly 100 of the more than 250 hostages held by Hamas since their Oct. 7 attacks remain in the clutches of Palestinian militants in Gaza. They include women and older people kidnapped from their homes, as well as soldiers abducted from military bases.

Israel and Hamas are deadlocked in negotiations over conditions for a truce that would free them. The Israeli authorities have declared that more than 30 hostages are already presumed dead, and their families fear that number will only rise as their loved ones languish in captivity.

With all eyes on Israel’s escalating battle with Hezbollah in Lebanon, many families now fear any hopes to save the hostages are rapidly vanishing, said Itzik Horn, whose sons Eitan, 38, and Iair, 46, are still held.

“We’ve been abandoned again and again” by the Israeli government, said Mr. Horn. “And now, the resources and attention are heading to the north.”

Both Eitan and Iair were abducted from Nir Oz, a border village that was devastated by the Hamas-led attack. Many of its roughly 400 members were either killed or kidnapped by Palestinian militants.

Eitan was visiting his brother, who held various roles in Nir Oz, including running the local pub, when the attack began. Soon afterward, Itzik, their father, lost contact with them. In November, a weeklong truce with Hamas secured the release of 105 hostages, some of whom attested to having seen the two brothers in the tunnels, said Mr. Horn.

Noam Dan, a relative of Ofer Kalderon — who was also abducted from Nir Oz — accused Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, of “cruelly neglecting” the remaining hostages in favor of the escalation. Mr. Kalderon’s children, Sahar and Erez, were released in the weeklong truce with Hamas in November.

Mr. Netanyahu has said that he is committed to securing the release of the remaining hostages. But he has repeatedly said he will not agree to a cease-fire with Hamas that compromises on what he called Israel’s fundamental security needs.

Like many close to the remaining captives, Ms. Dan said she believed Mr. Netanyahu was more worried about the future of his government than securing the release of the hostages. Some of his coalition partners have opposed recent cease-fire proposals.

“What matters to him most is his political survival, and now he’s managed to redirect the conversation close to the anniversary of his resounding failure,” she said. Ms. Dan and others blame Mr. Netanyahu’s government for failing to prevent Hamas’s surprise assault on Israel last year.

Gazans similarly fear that their plight will be shoved aside as the conflict there nears a once-unthinkable milestone: a year of almost constant war. Hundreds of thousands have crowded into an Israeli-designated “humanitarian zone” in central and southern Gaza, often living in rudimentary tent encampments where finding enough food and water can be a daily struggle.

Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have participated in demonstrations calling on the Israeli government to reach an agreement with Hamas to free the captives. The discovery of the six hostages dead in a tunnel a little over three weeks ago — executed by their Hamas guards, according to Israel — shocked the country and prompted mass protests.

But the negotiations stalled, primarily over Mr. Netanyahu’s demand to retain an Israeli military presence along Gaza’s border with Egypt. Hamas immediately rejected the condition.

In Israel, television panels full of former generals and political analysts pick apart the latest reports of strikes and counter-strikes over Israel’s northern border with Lebanon. Correspondents report from northern Israeli communities under rocket fire.

“There’s no momentum, no negotiations, not even a bit of anything. Everyone’s now busy with war in the north,” Mr. Horn said.