JERUSALEM: Israel said a drone targeted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s residence on Saturday, as Hezbollah launched a barrage of projectiles into Israel from its northern neighbor Lebanon.
On the southern front, Israel hammered Gaza with air strikes, with an overnight raid on Jabalia in the north killing 33 people, according to the besieged civil defense agency.
Netanyahu’s office said the prime minister and his wife were not at their residence in the central town of Caesarea during the drone attack and there were no injuries. Earlier, the military said a drone launched from Lebanon had “hit a structure” in Caesarea.
Sirens blared across Israel throughout the morning as Hezbollah fired projectiles from various locations in Lebanon.
The Iran-backed group said it launched a large salvo of advanced rockets at a military base in Israel’s Haifa region.
A man in the northern Israeli port city of Acre died after being struck by shrapnel, the Magen David Adom emergency service said, while shrapnel also wounded five people in the Haifa city of Kiryat Ata.
Late last month Israel ramped up air strikes on Lebanon and deployed ground forces after nearly a year of cross-border exchanges.
The fighting in Gaza came after the Israeli military killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar on Wednesday.
Sinwar, accused of masterminding the October 7 attack on Israel, was seen as pivotal to ending the Gaza war and securing the release of Israeli hostages.
On Friday, Qatar-based Hamas official Khalil Al-Hayya reiterated no hostages would be freed “unless the aggression against our people in Gaza stops.”
Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose country also backs Hamas, said the group “will not end at all with the martyrdom of Sinwar.”
As fighting raged in Gaza, civil defense agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal announced “33 deaths and dozens of wounded” in an Israeli strike on the northern area of Jabalia overnight.
The Israeli military said it was “looking into it.”
Early on Saturday, three houses in the Jabalia refugee camp were targeted, the civil defense agency said, while witnesses told AFP there was heavy gunfire and shelling in the direction of the camp.
Israeli forces have focused their attacks on northern Gaza, where they say Hamas is regrouping.
Witnesses also reported Israeli shelling in central Gaza’s Al-Bureij camp.
Israeli forces, accused of targeting health facilities, were shelling Indonesian Hospital in north Gaza, medics there said.
The violence has dashed hopes Sinwar’s death might bring the war closer to an end.
“We always thought that when this moment arrived, the war would end and our lives would return to normal,” 21-year-old Gazan Jemaa Abu Mendi said.
“But unfortunately, the reality on the ground is quite the opposite. The war has not stopped, and the killings continue unabated.”
Netanyahu said that while Sinwar’s killing did not spell the end of the war, it was “the beginning of the end.”
US President Joe Biden, along with the leaders of Germany, France and Britain, urged “the immediate necessity to bring the hostages home to their families, for ending the war in Gaza, and ensure humanitarian aid reaches civilians.”
In August, Netanyahu called Sinwar “the only obstacle to a hostage deal.”
Ayala Metzger, daughter-in-law of killed hostage Yoram Metzger, said with Sinwar dead it was “unacceptable” that hostages remained in captivity.
An Israeli autopsy found Sinwar was initially wounded in the arm by shrapnel, but killed by a gunshot to the head, the New York Times reported. The circumstances of the shot remain unclear.
Hamas sparked the war in Gaza with its October 7 attack last year that resulted in the deaths of 1,206 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures.
During the attack, militants took 251 hostages back into Gaza. Ninety-seven are still being held there, including 34 who the Israeli military has confirmed are dead.
Israel’s campaign to crush Hamas and bring back the hostages has killed 42,519 people in Gaza, mostly civilians, according to data from the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory, figures the UN considers reliable.
A conservative estimate puts the death toll among children in Gaza at over 14,100, said James Elder, spokesman for the United Nations children’s agency UNICEF.
For the one million children in the besieged territory, “Gaza is the real-world embodiment of hell on Earth,” he said.
Criticism has been mounting over the civilian toll and lack of food and aid reaching Gaza, where the UN has warned of famine.
There is also growing concern about the toll in Lebanon, where Israel is fighting a war with Hamas ally Hezbollah.
Lebanon’s health ministry said two people were killed in an Israeli strike on a vital highway north of Beirut on Saturday.
Since late September, the war has left at least 1,418 people dead in Lebanon, according to an AFP tally of Lebanese health ministry figures, though the real toll is likely higher.
The war has also drawn in other Iran-aligned armed groups, including in Yemen, Iraq and Syria.
On Friday and Saturday, the Israeli military reported drones being launched from Syria.
Iran conducted a missile strike on Israel on October 1, for which Israel has vowed to retaliate.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on Saturday that the “possibility of war in the region is always serious.”
“We want to reduce tensions, but.. we are ready for any scenario.”

PARIS: Slain Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was seen as a key obstacle to any agreement on the Israeli hostages seized during the October 7 attack that he orchestrated.
With his group plunged into a leadership vacuum by his death, the future of hostage negotiations appears to have become even more complicated.
Hamas now needs to appoint a replacement, and that person will play a key role in determining the fate of the Israelis kept hostage since its attack on October 7, 2023.
Of the 251 hostages taken to the Gaza Strip that day, 97 are still being held there, including 34 who the Israeli army has confirmed are dead.
Negotiations for their release are led by Israel’s intelligence services, with the help of the United States, Egypt and Qatar.
But that task will be no easier with Sinwar gone, analysts said.
“The hostages’ fate may now be sealed for the simple reason that there is no one left to negotiate their release,” said Karim Mezran, a Middle East expert at the Atlantic Council think tank.
US intelligence believed “Sinwar’s stance had hardened in recent weeks, leading American negotiators to believe that Hamas was no longer interested in reaching a ceasefire or hostage agreement,” said the New York-based Soufan Center.
So “any forthcoming negotiations can also serve as a litmus test for Hamas’s operational capacity in the post-Sinwar era,” the think tank added.
While the families of the hostages welcomed Sinwar’s killing, they also expressed “deep concern” about those still held captive.
“We call on the Israeli government, world leaders, and mediating countries to leverage the military achievement into a diplomatic one by pursuing an immediate agreement for the release,” the Hostages and Missing Persons Families Forum said on Friday.

Part of the problem lies in how Hamas is no longer the ultra-hierarchical organization it was when it carried out the October 7 attack which sparked the Gaza war.
Decimated and scattered by Israel’s offensive, and with the Gaza Strip cleaved in two by the Israeli army, today the militant group “operates in very localized cells, in a much more decentralized way,” researcher David Khalfa at the Fondation Jean-Jaures think tank told AFP.
Hamas “is now more of a militia with local warlords” that has links with “families which apparently are holding hostages,” he said.
That “is going to be a real problem for the Israelis and the Americans. Rather than a blanket agreement on the hostages, they will probably aim for releases bit by bit,” Khalfa said.
Until the middle of 2024, Hamas’s structure was split in two: on the one hand, the political branch led by Ismail Haniyeh, based in the Qatari capital Doha, and the paramilitary branch led by Sinwar in Gaza on the other.
Sinwar rose to become the overall leader of Hamas after Haniyeh was assassinated in July.
The balance of power between the two is now tilted toward the political bureau, “where the sources of funding, logistical support and militia training are concentrated,” Khalfa said.
If it chooses a leader in exile, the group runs the risk of seeing its new chief alienated from its forces on the ground in the Palestinian territories.
But if it appoints a fighter such as Sinwar’s brother Mohammed, Hamas will be signalling it has less interest in a political resolution to the war.

Hostage negotiations are now in unchartered territory.
“Prior negotiating efforts were all based on the idea that Sinwar had a line of connection to most of those holding hostages, and he could shape their actions,” Jon Alterman of the US think tank CSIS said.
“The picture is much murkier now, and we are likely to see a diverse array of outcomes,” he said.
There are even fears the hostages could be executed, perhaps in revenge for Sinwar’s killing or because the militants feel they can no longer sell the hostages for cash.
With no one in the group “willing to take the deadly risk of looking after them... the hostages may be left to their own devices and able to escape,” Mezran said.
“The fear is also that mid-level Hamas operatives may be tempted to eliminate the hostages to protect their own identities from the eventual retaliation of Israeli forces.”
The pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is enormous, but his government does not appear prepared to secure the hostages’ release at any price.
It will not have forgotten the 2011 release of more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, held hostage by Hamas for five years.
Among the Palestinians freed was Sinwar himself.
“They want to get away from the Shalit precedent, which was a mistake they paid a high price for,” Khalfa said.