Flights interrupted after missile strikes Israel’s largest airport

The projectile was one of ten fired from Lebanon at the center of the country, sending two million people to bomb shelters.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Flights to and from Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport were halted briefly Wednesday after a missile hit one of the airport’s parking lots during a barrage launched by Hezbollah from Lebanon.

While many were panicked by the large boom, no physical injuries were caused by the explosion. Some damage to the property was reported, with no details as yet regarding its severity.

According to the Ice news site, the missile did not descend directly in the flight paths of either departing or arriving planes and did not penetrate the actual airspace of the airport.

After about an hour where incoming planes circled the airport and all outgoing activity was halted, all flight activity returned to normal.

The army announced that ten missiles had been fired at Israel’s central region. Nine were shot down as some two million people raced for safe rooms in cities such as Tel Aviv, Raanana, Herzliya and Ramat Gan.

In Kfar Chabad, missile or interceptor fragments penetrated the ceiling of a childcare facility. The staff and young children were not hurt as they had evacuated in time to their protected area.

One large section of a rocket fell directly onto an empty, parked car in Raanana, several feet of its vertical shaft seen dramatically standing upright through the smashed windshield.

Rocket warning sirens also sounded in northern Israel, in the upper and western Galilee and Golan Heights as well as in communities close to the Lebanese border such as Metula and Kiryat Shmona.

The government has claimed that the army’s hundreds of bombings of Hezbollah weapons sites, and weeks-long ground incursion into Lebanese border villages and tunnel networks have destroyed most of the Iranian terror proxy’s missile supply.

Still, over the weeks of fighting, Hezbollah forces have often managed to launch about 80-100 missiles, rockets and UAVs a day, mostly at northern Israel.

The IDF announced later Wednesday that in current fighting in southern Lebanon, the reservist 8th Armored Brigade, under the command of the 91st Division, killed dozens of terrorists, including the area’s battalion commander, by directing an Air Force jet to a suspected compound.

In addition, the forces located, confiscated and destroyed many weapons, including Russian-made Kornet anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs), grenades, weapons and explosives that were hidden in civilian houses in villages and in secreted in underground infrastructures.

Ben Gurion AirportHezbollah missilesIDFRa'ananasouthern Lebanon