Middle East war live updates: Projectiles fired at Israel moments before October 7 ceremony, campaign group confirms death of Gaza hostage

Hezbollah said it targeted Israeli troops in a south Lebanon border village on Monday.

Hezbollah fighters “bombed… a gathering of Israeli forces in the Maroun al-Ras park with a rocket salvo”, the Iran-backed group said in a statement, the AFP reports.

It earlier announced it had targeted several areas of northern Israel and military positions across the border.

“Following the alerts that were activated a short time ago in the center of the country, five launches were detected that crossed from the Khan Yunis area, falls were detected in the area, the details are under investigation,” an IDF statement said.

The Israeli army earlier said it had deployed another division to participate in operations in Lebanon.

The first two repatriation flights for Australians and their relatives fleeing Lebanon, is expected to arrive in Sydney shortly.

ABC’s Ethan Rix is at Sydney International Airport and provided an update on the status of the flight, a short time ago.

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Hamas’ armed wing attacked Israel’s Tel Aviv with a missile salvo on Monday, the group said in statement

The Israeli military said sirens sounded in central Israel. 

Reporting by Reuters

ABC Global Affairs Editor John Lyons is in Beirut, Lebanon reporting on the war in the Middle East.

In this analysis piece, he notes Hezbollah’s strategic mistake in its conflict with Israel — that the militant group prepared for an extensive ground invasion and not for the State’s extensive air capabilities.

Read the full piece here:

ABC Middle East correspondent Eric Tlozek reports that the civilian impact of Israel’s ongoing offensive in Beirut continues to grow, as the IDF claims to be targeting Hezbollah infrastructure and weapons facilities in the southern suburbs.

“There’s so many people displaced from the southern suburbs. There’s sheltering and sleeping rough all around the city,” he said.

Watch the full report below.

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Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak has said Israel must respond to last week’s missile strikes by Iran.

Iran launched what Israel says were 180 ballistic missiles into its territory last week.

The attack came after an Israeli strike that killed then Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

Speaking to 7.30, Mr Barak said simply accepting the Iranian strike is not an option.

“Even with Iran, we have to respond to the compelling need,” Mr Barak told 7.30.

“We cannot … no sovereign [country] would accept such an attack.

We can hit [Iran] in many ways. We can destroy certain oil production or a big, big port from where it is exported, mainly to China.

We can hit the missile production and drone production, which mainly go to Russia and we can even try to damage the nuclear plant.”

However, Mr Barak warned that for Israel to strike Iran would be difficult as missiles would have to be launched across Iraq and Jordan.

“We cannot hit Iran without crossing two neighbouring countries,” Mr Barak said.

“We cannot even reach them without having a certain kind of understanding with our neighbours which … do not want to participate in any kind of war that we feel a need to go into.”

Watch the full interview tonight on 7.30 on ABC iview.

An Israeli campaign group has announced the death of a hostage held in Gaza, as the country marked the first anniversary of the October 7 Hamas attack.

The Hostages and Missing Families Forum said Idan Shtivi, 28, was abducted from the site of the Nova festival and his “body is still held captive by Hamas”.

The forum said Shtivi had just arrived at the festival site when the attack began.

“On October 7, Idan arrived at the Nova Festival in the early morning to document his friends’ performances and workshops,” it said in a statement.

“However, he never made it inside. When the attack began, Idan helped two strangers he had just met escape from the site. This selfless choice ultimately led to his abduction.”

The IDF later told Times of Israel that the decision to declare Shtivi dead was based on new intelligence and “confirmed by a panel of experts from the Health Ministry, together with participants from the Religious Affairs Ministry and the Israel Police”.

“The IDF operates with a range of methods to try and gather information on the hostages in Gaza,” it said.

It did not confirm when it suspected Shtivi might have died.

The IDF has released a statement claiming five rockets were launched at the Israeli city of Haifa during an attack on Sunday night, local time.

“Interceptors were fired. Fallen projectiles were identified in the area. The incident is under review,” it said.

It said 15 other rockets were fired at Tiberias, some of them intercepted.

We reported earlier that two rockets had hit Haifa. Police in Haifa said several buildings and properties were damaged, with several reports of minor injuries and some people taken to a nearby hospital.

“This was the first real hit in the city,” said its mayor, Yona Yahav.

The Israeli military has said at least four projectiles were fired from the Gaza Strip just minutes after the country began to formally commemorate last year’s October 7 attacks.

“Following the sirens that sounded at 06:31 in several communities near the Gaza Strip, four projectiles were identified crossing from the southern Gaza Strip,” the IDF said in a statement.

“Three of the projectiles were intercepted by the IAF [air force] and a fallen projectile was identified in an open area.”

The armed wing of Hamas earlier said it fired rockets into southern Israel at “enemy gatherings” at Rafah crossing, Kerem Shalom crossing and kibbutz Holit near the border with Gaza.

The IDF said it had also prevented an “immediate threat” from Hamas’s intentions to fire rockets.

“The IAF struck Hamas launch posts and underground terrorist infrastructure throughout the Gaza Strip,” the military said.

“Furthermore, overnight, the IAF and IDF artillery struck targets in the central Gaza Strip that posed a threat to IDF troops operating in the area.”

The military said sirens also sounded in the Upper Galilee area of northern Israel — with no let-up in the daily rocket fire from neighbouring Lebanon, where Israeli forces are fighting Hezbollah.

Earlier the military said it had also intercepted two “suspicious aerial targets” that were launched from the east.

Former prime minister John Howard has released a statement calling Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel “the greatest atrocity inflicted on Jewish people since the Holocaust” and claiming current Prime Minister Anthony Albanese‘s government has failed “by its words and deeds, to reflect this”.

“Australia’s Jewish community should know that it remains a treasured part of our nation,” Howard said.

“The anniversary of this terrible event is a time to condemn the failure of the Prime Minister to show leadership on this issue.

“More importantly it is a time to strengthen our opposition to anti-Semitism and further extend the hand of Australian mateship to Jewish Australians amongst us.”

Senior Fellow for Israeli Affairs at the Middle East Institute Dr Nimrod Goren says there is a “lack of trust” in the current Israeli leadership.

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Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott backed the “utter” destruction of Hamas, Hezbollah and their fighters, saying “almost nothing is more important for democracies everywhere” than Israel’s victory.

He spoke at an anti-Semitism rally organised by a group of Christians outside Parliament House in Canberra this afternoon.

Several hundred pro-Israel supporters attended the rally, including former Labor MP Mike Kelly, Liberal senators Bridget McKenzie, Jane Hume and Simon Birmingham, as well as Israel’s ambassador to Australia Amir Maimon.

“This is a tragic day,” Mr Abbott said. “But it’s also, in a way, a brave day.

“Because while we grieve for the dead and we mourn with those who mourn, we also admire the courage, the resilience, the never-say-die spirit and that yearn to triumph which exists in the Israeli people and the Israeli government.

“The worst catastrophe to befall Jewish people since the Holocaust, a day of infamy where the killers did not just kill, but they exalted in their killing.

“Even the Nazis tried to hide what they did, but these murderers reveled and exalted and posted on social media.

“That’s why it is absolutely right that these murderers and the organisations which put them to it should be utterly destroyed.”

The armed wing of Hamas claimed it fired rockets into southern Israel on Monday as the country marked the first anniversary of the attack the Palestinian group launched on this day last year.

The Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades said in a statement that its fighters fired the projectiles at “enemy gatherings” at Rafah crossing, Kerem Shalom crossing and kibbutz Holit near the border with Gaza.

Reporting by AFP

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade “makes no apology” for Australia’s views on Iran’s strikes on Israel, after Iranian media reported the Australian ambassador had been summoned by Tehran.

A DFAT spokesperson condemned the missile strikes as “reckless” and a “dangerous escalation”.

Read the full story here: 

People in Jerusalem and Reim, Israel have marked the anniversary of October 7 by gathering with photos of hostages taken during the attack.

These are some photos taken at the events.

Good afternoon.

I’ll be joining Liana for the next few hours as we continue our rolling coverage.

Here’s a summary of the day’s events:

• An Israeli policewoman has been killed following a shooting attack in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba.
• At least 26 people have been killed, and 93 others wounded, after Israeli air strikes hit a mosque and a school sheltering displaced people in the Gaza Strip, according to Hamas media.
• Two Hezbollah rockets have penetrated Israel’s Iron Dome defence system and struck the port city of Haifa.
• Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has marked the anniversary of October 7 as an opportunity to “reflect on the horrific terrorist atrocity that reverberated around the globe”.
• Iran’s Quds Force commander, Esmail Qaani, has been missing since Beirut strikes late last week.
• Ian McConville, the Australian ambassador in Tehran has been summoned over “bias” towards regional developments.
• The first of the onward flights out of Beirut to Sydney left Larnaca, Cyprus, on Sunday evening and is due to touch down in Australia this evening.
• The IDF attacked a hospital in the central Gaza region of Deir al-Balah, where a mosque was also hit yesterday.
• Qatar Airways has agreed to operate special charter flights to facilitate the repatriation of Australians currently in Lebanon.
• An Israeli soldier has been killed, and two severely wounded, while fighting on the Lebanese border, according to the IDF.

In the past year in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli military says:

• It bombed more than 40,000 targets.
• Found 4,700 tunnel shafts. 
• Destroyed 1,000 rocket launcher sites.
• 726 Israeli soldiers have been killed since October 7, 2023. 
• Of those, 380 died in the October 7attacks and 346 in Gaza combat, starting October 27.
• 56 soldiers died as a result of operational accidents, which the military did not define.
• It has enlisted 300,000 reservists since the start of the war — 82% men and 18% women and nearly half of them aged 20 to 29.

Since the start of the war, 13,200 rockets were fired into Israel from Gaza.

• 12,400 were fired from Lebanon.
• 60 came from Syria.
• 180 from Yemen.
• 400 from Iran.

The IDF says it killed more than 800 “terrorists” in Lebanon, where 4,900 targets have been struck from the air along with about 6,000 ground targets. 

Over the past year, Israel arrested more than 5,000 suspects in the West Bank and Jordan Valley.

The military said it killed eight Gaza militant brigade commanders, about 30 battalion commanders and 165 company commanders over the past year.

Israel’s military said in a statement early on Monday that one soldier had been killed in combat on the Lebanese border and two soldiers were severely injured.

Former correspondent Ben Knight says the IDF is showing no signs of letting up in its offensive against Hezbollah.

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Israel reiterated its call for the complete evacuation of heavily destroyed northern Gaza, where up to 300,000 people are estimated to have remained.

“We are in a new phase of the war,” the military said in leaflets dropped over the area.

“These areas are considered dangerous combat zones.”

A later statement said three projectiles were identified crossing from northern Gaza into Israeli territory, with no injuries reported.