A Hezbollah rocket struck a residential building in Nahariya on Monday evening, wounding six people — two adults and four minors — with smoke inhalation from the resulting fire 1. Two houses were destroyed. Nahariya, eight kilometres from the Lebanese border, has been under intermittent fire for seventeen days.
The rocket arrived on the same night Israel's 91st Division crossed into eastern southern Lebanon in what the IDF called a targeted ground operation to establish forward defence. Haaretz assessed the incursion is designed to defend the border rather than halt Hezbollah rocket fire and would likely push launch sites northward without stopping the barrages 2. The Nahariya strike landed as that assessment predicted. Israel's cumulative toll since 28 February stands at 15 killed and more than 3,138 wounded .
Hezbollah's secretary-general Naim Qassem declared last week that the group has committed 30,000 fighters to what he called an existential battle, with some from the elite Radwan unit deployed in the south . The group reported direct ground clashes with Israeli forces in Khiam on Saturday night and fired over 100 rockets in a single barrage as recently as 10 March . The ground operation has opened a new axis of contact in southern Lebanon without closing the rocket threat above it. For families in Nahariya, Haifa, and the Galilee, the war overhead continues.
