Hezbollah launched a large rocket attack on Israel’s Meron air control base on 6 January as part of the “preliminary response” to the attack on the Dahiye suburb of Beirut and the assassination of senior Hamas leader and co-founder of the Qassam Brigades, Saleh al-Arouri.
“Resistance fighters carried out an initial response at 08:10 AM on Saturday, targeting the Meron Air Surveillance Base with 62 rockets of various types, achieving direct and confirmed hits. This was in response to the assassination of the great leader Sheikh Saleh al-Arouri and his martyred brothers in the southern suburb of Beirut,” a Hezbollah statement reads.
The critical surveillance base is located on the top of Mount Meron, the highest mountain peak in Israel, just over seven kilometers from the Lebanese border. The base monitors the region and is a critical control point for the Israeli air force.
“Meron base is responsible for organizing, coordinating, and managing all air operations towards Syria, Lebanon, Turkiye, Cyprus, and the northern part of the Eastern Mediterranean basin,” Hezbollah’s statement adds. “Additionally, this base is a primary center for electronic jamming operations in the directions mentioned. A large number of elite Zionist officers and soldiers operate at this base.”
The statement added that Israel possesses “no equivalent alternative” to the base.
In a 2011 Haaretz article, the daily spoke with a top commander at Meron who said that the base is always alert, watching the area’s aerial activity. Noting that the base goes into a state of high alert if an incident happens as far as Greece and if an incident occurs in Israel’s western sector, the southern sector gets put on high alert as a precaution.
Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah said during a speech on Friday that the killing of Arouri will “undoubtedly not go unanswered or unpunished; the decision lies in the hands of the [battlefield].”
The Lebanese resistance says Saturday’s attack is the “first act of revenge,” alluding to more retaliatory attacks in the future.
Israeli media reported that, after the attack, a state of fear gripped the settlers of the north and Golan region” especially after the day’s targeting that shook the region,” further adding that there were several injuries who were transferred to hospitals.
Before the attack, air raid sirens were heard blaring across 94 settlements in northern Israel, including alarms in Karmiel and Kfar Varadim for the first time since the beginning of the war.
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