Suspicion of a Hezbollah Drone Spying on Netanyahu’s Family Home
Sudan Events – Agencies
Israel suspected that Hezbollah launched a reconnaissance drone towards the family home of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose office said he was not at the residence at the time, amid Hezbollah’s preparations to respond to the assassination of its military commander Fuad Shukr, in the context of ongoing escalation, which resulted in the injury of three UNIFIL soldiers by Israeli fire in southern Lebanon.
The right-wing Israeli newspaper (Israel Hayom) revealed on Sunday suspicions that Hezbollah had launched a reconnaissance drone in the airspace of the coastal city of Caesarea last Friday to gather information about Netanyahu’s private residence, where he spends his weekends. The newspaper reported that an Israeli navy missile ship stationed off the coast of Caesarea on Friday reported a suspected drone, which it claimed was flying over the area, but “no indicators of it appeared on other monitoring systems.”
The Israeli Air Force sent fighter jets to the area after receiving the alert, but they were unable to locate the drone. As a result, the Israeli military speculated that the alert from the missile ship might have been a false alarm, considering that “radar systems can sometimes give false signals due to a flock of birds or other factors.” However, the military and the air force did not entirely rule out the possibility that the drone might have been launched from Lebanon.
Netanyahu’s office stated that “the prime minister was not in the Caesarea compound at that time” and considered it a “false alarm.”
This revelation comes alongside Hezbollah’s preparations to respond to the assassination of Fuad Shukr in the southern suburbs of Beirut late last month. Hassan Fadlallah, a member of Hezbollah’s parliamentary bloc (Loyalty to the Resistance), said, “When the resistance commits to retaliating against an aggression, as it has in response to the targeting of the southern suburbs, its motive is to establish a deterrent, protection, and punishment for the enemy so that it does not repeat such attacks, and so that it does not easily target civilians and civilian areas.” He continued, “Every decision of the resistance has a goal, and the way to achieve that goal is determined by the leadership of the resistance, which always looks for the best methods and means to achieve the objective, because what matters is achieving the goal, not what so-and-so or another person wants, and the resistance does not work for anyone, and its timing is not on anyone’s clock, but rather according to its accurate and deliberate timing for any option it takes.”
The method by which Shukr was discovered before his assassination remains a security mystery. After the *Wall Street Journal* reported, citing a Hezbollah source, that Shukr “received a call from someone asking him to move from his apartment on the second floor to the seventh,” and that the caller was “someone who infiltrated the party’s internal communications network,” Hezbollah denied this information, issuing an official denial of the story, and stated in a press release that the three journalists who put their names on the article “never met any of the party officials at all.”
Three UNIFIL Soldiers Injured
Amid the threats, the escalation continues in southern Lebanon, with Lebanese media reporting that three UNIFIL soldiers were injured by Israeli shelling.
UNIFIL did not specify the nature of the explosion or its source, and announced in a statement on Sunday that “three peacekeepers were slightly injured when an explosion occurred near their vehicle, which was clearly marked with UN insignia, in the vicinity of Yaroun, in southern Lebanon.”
The statement added that “all the peacekeepers who were on patrol returned safely to their base, and we are investigating the incident.”
Earlier, Lebanon’s official *National News Agency* reported that “Israeli warplanes carried out two consecutive airstrikes on the town of Al-Dhahira,” about one kilometer from Yaroun, resulting in “injuries.”
A UNIFIL source, speaking on condition of anonymity, suggested that the explosion that injured the soldiers was likely caused by a nearby airstrike and not a direct targeting.
The Israeli military said in a statement that it had “conducted a series of airstrikes on southern Lebanon, targeting a Hezbollah cell, destroying weapons storage facilities, a rocket-launching platform, and a military building belonging to the party.”
The statement added that an Israeli drone “targeted a Hezbollah cell operating in the Shebaa area in southern Lebanon.” It also stated that “during another airstrike in the Shebaa area, fighter jets destroyed a weapons storage facility used by Hezbollah.”
In addition, airstrikes targeted a weapons storage facility and a military building belonging to the organization in the areas of Aita al-Shaab and Al-Mutmura, and a platform used by the organization to launch rockets was destroyed in the Al-Tiri area in southern Lebanon.
The Resistance Brigades mourned a fighter from the town of Shebaa who died in an Israeli airstrike that targeted his motorcycle. The party retaliated against the “assassination and attack carried out by the Israeli enemy in the town of Shebaa” by shelling the “Command Battalion headquarters in Beit Hilal barracks with Katyusha rocket salvos.”
The party also announced five other operations targeting the Zarit barracks, Roissat Al-Alam site in Kafr Shuba hills, Al-Malikiya site,!
