Hamas claims rocket fire from Lebanon on Israel’s Upper Galilee

By Iyad Nabolsi

ISTANBUL (AA) – Hamas on Sunday claimed responsibility for a rocket fire from Lebanon on Upper Galilee in northern Israel.

The group’s armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, said 20 Grad rockets were launched from Lebanon at an Israeli army base near the town of Shomera.

It said the rocket fire was in response to “massacres committed by the Israeli enemy” in Gaza and the West Bank.

Ismail Al-Thawabteh of Gaza’s government media office told Anadolu early Sunday that around 150 people killed by the Israeli army had been found in two mass graves at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip.

The Israeli army had withdrawn from Khan Younis on April 7 after a 4-month ground offensive in the city.

Israel has launched a brutal offensive on the Gaza Strip since Oct. 7, 2023 following a Hamas attack that killed nearly 1,200 people.

Nearly 34,100 people have since been killed and 77,000 others injured amid mass destructions and severe shortages of necessities.

Around 500 Palestinians have also been killed and more than 4,900 others injured by Israeli fire in the occupied West Bank since Oct. 7, according to the Health Ministry.

The Israeli war has pushed 85% of Gaza’s population into internal displacement amid acute shortages of food, clean water, and medicine, while 60% of the enclave's infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed, according to the UN.

*Writing by Rania Abu Shamala