Hezbollah expanded its attacks on Israel on August 21, targeting the Israeli town of Katzrin in the Golan Heights with a large barrage of rockets. Hezbollah has hit numerous sites in the Golan in recent months, and its recent attack on the Katzrin, the largest in this area since October 8, 2023, caused significant damage and injured one person. The IDF singled out the barrage in its statements, illustrating how seriously Israel considers the group’s latest round of rocket fire.
Hezbollah has recently expanded its attacks on northern Israel. The Iranian-backed group has launched 7,500 rockets and 200 drones at Israel in the last 10 months, often targeting communities within several miles of the Lebanese border. Most of these Jewish communities have been evacuated, and around 60,000 residents continue to live in hotels or areas outside of their villages and towns.
Hezbollah previously expanded its attacks in August to target the small communities of Shamir and Ayelet HaShachar, both of which are in the Huleh Valley, several miles south of the Lebanese border. Neither of these locales have been evacuated, and Hezbollah singled them out with barrages on August 15 and 17.
On August 21, the first attack on Katzrin in the Golan began at 8:21 am. More than 50 rockets were fired, and several impacted the town. Hezbollah followed the initial barrage with attacks between 11:23 and 11:33 and several more in the afternoon, ending this round of escalation at sunset. In all, sirens sounded in more than 40 communities on August 21.
Hezbollah claimed the barrage that struck Katzrin was aimed at a nearby IDF base, which the group claimed houses forces from the IDF’s “651st maintenance unit.” Hezbollah also stated that it targeted a number of other IDF sites in northern Israel. Hezbollah often claims that its attacks target the Israeli military, even when they consist of indiscriminate rocket fire. In some cases, the group’s precision drone and anti-tank missile strikes do aim at IDF sites. However, the rockets often also target civilian areas.
“Thousands of families and civilian homes targeted and hit by Hezbollah fire,” the IDF’s spokesperson to international media, Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani, said in a statement. Shoshani posted an image of one of the homes damaged by rocket fire. “This is one of the few houses that were just destroyed by Hezbollah’s barbaric attack on Israeli civilians in Katzrin, northern Israel. There was no other target in the area other than a civilian neighborhood and kids on their summer vacation. Like any other country in the world, attacks against our civilians will not go unanswered.”
IDF Spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari also condemned the attacks in a separate statement in Hebrew, illustrating the seriousness of the situation.
In the wake of the Katzrin attack, Brigadier General Yair Peli, the commander of Israel’s 210th Division responsible for protecting the Golan Heights, held a situational assessment in Katzrin with the IDF’s Home Front command. Peli also met with the civilian leadership of the Golan Regional Council, the head of the Katzrin Local Council, and others. The latest attacks on civilian areas in the Golan come after a rocket killed 12 children and teenagers in the Druze town of Majdal Shams on July 27.
After Peli met with local officials, Brigadier General (Res) Alon Friedman, the commander of Northern Command’s Home Front Division, also slammed Hezbollah for the attack. “This is a village with approximately 8,000 people,” he noted. The IDF also said that Hezbollah “fired rockets toward the area of Zar’it.”
Israeli warplanes struck a building from which it said the rocket fire originated. Another airstrike hit Kfarkela in southern Lebanon, and the IDF fired artillery at “threats in the areas of Ayta ash Shab and Aalma El Chaeb in southern Lebanon,” according to the IDF.
While Hezbollah was escalating attacks on the Golan, the IDF also carried out a strike on Khalil Al-Maqdah, whom the IDF described as operating “on behalf of the Hezbollah terrorist organization and the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).”
According to an extensive Israeli statement on the strike, Maqdah was responsible for coordinating terror attacks in the West Bank and smuggling weapons and funds to terrorists. Over the past two years, there has been an increase in arms smuggled to groups in the West Bank. Most of the weapons consist of rifles that have ended up in the hands of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other organizations.
The IDF’s statement presents new evidence of how this smuggling network is linked to Iran and Hezbollah and has become more sophisticated. The Maqdah strike also comes in the larger context of various other Palestinian terror groups, including Hamas, working with Hezbollah in Lebanon.
