Hezbollah fired a new kind of missile into Israel for the first time in the 17-day conflict, Nawwar Sahili, a Hezbollah member of parliament, said Friday in a telephone interview.
The Shiite organization fired a Khaibar-1 at the northern town of
Afula, which lies about 60 kilometres south of the Lebanese border, Sahili said.
"We are against escalation, but we will not stand by while our people are dying because of the Israeli aggression," he said, without providing further details. "We had no choice."
The missile was carrying about 100 kilograms (220 pounds) of explosives, and landed in an open space, causing no casualties, police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said by phone.
Hezbollah had previously been using shorter-range Katyusha rockets.
"There's no force in Lebanon that can keep Hezbollah from throwing rockets into Israel," Mahmoun Fandy, a research fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, said in a telephone interview.
"The government doesn't have the political will or strength to confront Hezbollah's militia, who could ransack the whole Lebanese state if they wanted to."
There was speculation in the Israeli media after the attacks that the rockets were a new variant that had a range of 90 kilometres and might be able to carry as much as 200 kilograms of explosives.
If true, this would make these rockets the most dangerous in the Hezbollah arsenal. Such a rocket would be capable of hitting heavily populated areas between Haifa and Tel Aviv.
The rocket launchers used in the Afula attacks were quickly destroyed by Israeli warplanes, the Israeli Defence Forces said.
In all, Hezbollah fired more than 90 rockets into Israel on Friday. Most of them landed in and near border towns and in the Galilee.
The Khaibar-1 is named after the site of a historic battle between Islam's Prophet Muhammad and Jewish tribes in the Arabian peninsula.
