BEIRUT (Dispatches) — 
Hezbollah said it battled Israeli troops on Monday in south Lebanon and launched a barrage of rockets in central Israeli occupied territories on Monday, a day after claiming a deadly drone attack near Haifa.
In a statement, the resistance group said its fighters fired “a salvo of rockets” at the Beit Lid military base east of Netanya. The Israeli military said the rockets were fired from Lebanon toward central territories, setting off sirens in the Netanya and Wadi Ara areas. 
Hezbollah claimed in another statement Monday to have launched a series of rockets at the Stella Maris Israeli naval base northwest of Haifa, saying the attack was “at the service” of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the group’s leader who was assassinated in a terrorist Israeli strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs last month. 
Hezbollah fighters were also “engaged in violent clashes” in the Lebanese frontier village of Aita al-Shaab where an Israeli troop carrier had been targeted “with a guided missile”.
Hezbollah says its strikes are in solidarity with its Palestinians fighting a brutal Israeli aggression on Gaza and the West Bank since October last year.
The latest barrages of rockets come nearly two weeks after Israel began a ground invasion into south Lebanon, marking a major escalation in the war on Lebanon. 
The Israeli military has intensified its airstrikes across the country for the past three weeks, a year after cross-border hostilities erupted on Oct. 8, 2023.
Since then, more than 2,300 people have been martyred in Lebanon and over 10,600 others injured, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry.  
On Sunday night, Hezbollah said it launched a “squadron of kamikaze drones” at the Golani military base in Binyamina, south of Haifa, in retaliation for Israeli strikes in Beirut, including one last Thursday that martyred at least 22 people. The group added that it simultaneously launched rockets with a swarm of drones to “overwhelm” Israeli air defenses.
Some of the unmanned aircraft, which included drone models Hezbollah has not used before, penetrated Israeli air defense radars without being detected, it added.
“There was a huge boom and then suddenly ambulances started driving past, first one, then two, then three and more and more,” Yousef, the manager of a restaurant near the Binyamina base, told AFP, declining to give his full name for safety reasons.
In a statement on Monday, the Israeli military said four soldiers were killed in the drone attack on the Golani military base, the deadliest strike inside Israel in three

 weeks, and eight others were seriously injured. Israel’s ambulance service, Magen David Adom, said 61 people were injured. 
“We are at war, and an attack on a training base on the home front is difficult and the results are painful,” Lieutenant Geneal Herzi Halevi told soldiers during a visit to the Golani Brigade training base.
At least 54 people in the Israeli occupied territories have been killed in retaliatory rocket attacks since last October, according to Zionist authorities, nearly half of them soldiers.
Zionist forces on Monday launched a string of new airstrikes on targets in Lebanon, including one on the north of the country which martyred at least 18 people, according to the Lebanese Red Cross.
The airstrikes in northern Lebanon marked a departure from the usual pattern, being located far from the main combat area and in a mostly Christian area.
An AFP photographer at the site of the strike in Aito said it had leveled a residential building at the entrance to the village.
Body parts were scattered in the rubble, with Red Cross volunteers searching for survivors while ambulances evacuated wounded people.
Lebanon’s health ministry said that among dozens of people killed in Israel’s strikes over the weekend were 16 in Maaysra, a village in a Christian-majority area north of Beirut.
Israel also faced new criticism over their alleged attacks on United Nations peacekeepers in southern Lebanon.
On Sunday, Zionist prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on the UNIFIL mission to withdraw for their own safety.
Five peacekeepers were injured in a series of incidents last week, with the latest seeing the UN force accuse Israeli troops of breaking through a gate and entering one of their positions.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, whose country is a major troop contributor, said on Monday that there would be “no withdrawal” of the UN peacekeeping force from southern Lebanon.
Under Security Council Resolution 1701, only UNIFIL’s roughly 9,500 troops and the Lebanon’s army should be deployed in Lebanon’s south.
In a call with his U.S. counterpart Lloyd Austin, Israeli war minister Yoav Gallant discussed Sunday’s night’s drone attack, his office said in a statement on Monday.
Just before Sunday’s attack, the Pentagon said it would deploy a high-altitude anti-missile system known as THAAD and its U.S. military crew to Occupied Palestine.