Over the holy Shabbat of May 2026, the residents of Kiryat Shmona, Safed, Karmiel, Nahariya, and dozens of communities across the north spent much of the Jewish day of rest sprinting to shelters. Hezbollah launched repeated rocket barrages targeting northern Israel from Friday night through Saturday, striking communities across the Galilee and forcing residents into shelters throughout the day. Residents described the long night of repeated siren warnings and explosions and expressed profound frustration with the government for failing to end the threat from the Iran-backed Lebanese terror group.
While Iron Dome intercepted the majority of projectiles, one rocket scored a direct hit on a commercial center in Kiryat Shmona — the largest Israeli city on the northern border — causing significant structural damage. The center was closed for Shabbat, and no casualties were reported. The attacks began overnight with an initial salvo of approximately 15 rockets aimed at the Kiryat Shmona area, followed throughout Saturday by additional barrages targeting the Safed region, Karmiel, and communities across the Western Galilee. Some 140 air raid sirens sounded repeatedly across dozens of northern communities, sending families into protected rooms and public shelters for much of the day.
The scale of Saturday’s attack is the latest chapter in a grinding war that has been building since March. Since Hezbollah entered the current fighting on March 2, it has launched approximately 100 rockets or drones per day against Israel, including nearly 200 on March 11 alone. According to the IDF, Hezbollah has fired a total of some 3,000 rockets and other projectiles from areas south of the Litani River throughout the current fighting — a figure the military said proved the Lebanese army had “lied” about dismantling the terror group’s infrastructure in the area. The damage on the ground is real: a house in Kibbutz Misgav Am was directly hit, a school in Deir al-Asad was struck, vehicles were destroyed in a direct hit on a Safed parking lot, and property in Nahariya was extensively damaged. In central Israel, a house was destroyed by a direct missile hit in Moshav Haniel, though an elderly woman and her caregiver inside the safe room emerged unscathed.
The Sages teach that an enemy who attacks on the Sabbath does so not merely as a military calculation — he does so to desecrate what is sacred. This is theological warfare, a war against the Jewish people’s very right to rest in their own land.
The Saturday attacks also revealed a significant intelligence reassessment. Israeli defense officials disclosed that Hezbollah’s core organizational command structures have not returned to Dahiyeh, the group’s traditional stronghold in southern Beirut. At the start of the conflict, Hezbollah’s leadership dispersed and embedded itself in other parts of Beirut — including Christian Maronite neighborhoods — and did not return when the ceasefire came into effect. Senior IDF officials are now pushing back against the widely held assumption that strikes on Dahiyeh would operationally cripple Hezbollah. The terrorist organization has deliberately adapted to survive — a harder, more diffuse, more lethal target than previously assessed.
Despite the relentless assault on Israel’s north, the Lebanese government of Prime Minister Nawaf Salam finds itself in an impossible position of its own making. The Lebanese government publicly condemned Hezbollah’s renewed strikes against Israel for endangering and undermining the Lebanese state, moved to ban Hezbollah’s military activities, and called on the group to place its weapons under government control and end unauthorized attacks from Lebanese territory. But Hezbollah has no intention of complying. Hezbollah Secretary-General Na’im Qassem has escalated his rhetoric against the Lebanese president and government, accusing state institutions of failing to safeguard Lebanon’s sovereignty and the Shi’ite community, and stating plainly that the “resistance” will not surrender and is prepared for confrontation. Lebanon’s government talks peace and disarmament; Hezbollah fires rockets. The Lebanese state is not governing Hezbollah — it is hostage to it.
The IDF has destroyed 85-90% of Hezbollah’s pre-2023 rocket arsenal — reducing what was once a stockpile of more than 150,000 rockets to between 10,000 and 23,000. Yet even a diminished Hezbollah is launching a hundred rockets a day. Hezbollah still possesses approximately 1,000 long-range precision-guided rockets — the weapons capable of reaching Tel Aviv and beyond. The IDF has expanded operations into southern Lebanon, with troops of the 36th Division crossing the Litani River, and schools in border communities shuttered as the Home Front Command tightened restrictions.
