BEIRUT, Lebanon - Hamas militants on Monday fired 16 rockets from Lebanon towards northern Israel, the Palestinian group's armed wing announced, saying they targeted areas south of the Israeli coastal city of Haifa.

(Photo from AFP)
The Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades said the strikes came "in response to the occupation's (Israel's) massacres and its aggression against our people in the Gaza Strip".
The Israeli army meanwhile reported about 30 projectiles had been fired at northern Israel from Lebanon, adding that it fired back at the direction they had been launched from.
On Monday evening, Lebanon's official news agency reported Israeli air strikes and artillery fire in the country's south.
It came after the health ministry in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip announced earlier in the day that the death toll in the enclave had surpassed 10,000 nearly a month after the start of the war triggered by the militant group's unprecedented attack on Israel.
Israeli officials say more than 1,400 people, most of them civilians, were killed in Israel, the majority on the day of the October 7 attack, during which Hamas took more than 240 people hostage.
Hamas, which is allied with Lebanon's Iran-backed Shiite group Hezbollah, has a number of fighters in south Lebanon and has previously claimed attacks on Israel from there.
Shortly before the rocket launches were announced, Hamas's leader in Lebanon, Osama Hamdan, had declared at a press conference that the group would not allow a puppet government to be installed in Gaza.
"To those who think that Hamas will disappear, Hamas will remain entrenched in the conscience of our people, and no force on Earth can annihilate or marginalise it," he said.
Tensions have run high at the border between Israel and Lebanon -- which remain technically at war -- since the October 7 attack, with Hezbollah and Israel regularly exchanging attacks.
However, this is the first time during this war that a group in Lebanon has claimed to have targeted sites so far from the border. The port city of Haifa is located around 50 kilometres (30 miles) from Lebanon.
Since October 7, at least 83 people have been killed on the Lebanese side in cross-border skirmishes, according to an AFP tally, including 11 civilians.
Six soldiers and two civilians have been killed on the Israeli side.