Included in the batch are multiple drones from the Army’s company-level small unmanned aerial system, or UAS, program. The service had selected the Ghost-X, made by Anduril Industries, and the C-100, made by Performance Drone Works.

In a release, the Pentagon said these will offer versatile weapons for the units in the field, useful for targeting or surveilling the enemy.

Replicator will also include Anduril’s Altius-600, a one-way attack drone on contract with the Marine Corps, and the enterprise test vehicle, or ETV. The latter drone has long been rumored as a Replicator candidate, with requirements like a 500-nautical mile range that fit the program’s parameters.

The Air Force and Defense Innovation Unit are considering four vendors for the ETV: Anduril, Integrated Solutions for Systems Inc., Leidos Dynetics and Zone 5 Technologies.

Wednesday’s statement marks the second — and most specific — time the Pentagon has disclosed what systems it’s buying for the program. Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks announced Replicator last year at a tech conference in downtown Washington, pledging to field thousands of cheap drones by August 2025, or within two years.

Hicks has said her goal is to deter China, which has a far larger population and manufacturing sector. In part due to that aim, the Pentagon hasn’t listed much of what it’s buying through Replicator. Before this week, the Defense Department had only publicly acknowledged one drone included in the program: AeroVironment’s Switchblade 600, another one-way attack drone.

Such furtiveness has at times chafed companies hoping to compete for funding. The Defense Department secured $500 million for fiscal year 2024, with the same amount included in the defense budget request for fiscal year 2025, which Congress hasn’t yet passed.

In Wednesday’s statement, the Pentagon said that it considered 500 commercial firms for Replicator, awarding contracts to 30 companies. A further 50 are included as subcontractors.

In a separate release, Anduril said it was “rapidly” increasing production of its Altius and Barracuda drones in order to meet the Pentagon’s demand.

“The Replicator initiative is demonstrably reducing barriers to innovation, and delivering capabilities to warfighters at a rapid pace,” Hicks wrote in the statement, which notes that other systems in the program remain classified.

The deputy has long argued that Replicator is a way of doing business rather than a discrete program. Buying and fielding systems at a faster pace has long been a challenge under the strictures of Pentagon bureaucracy, and Replicator is meant to offer a faster path for urgent needs.

The second phase of the program will focus on weapons that can counter the kind of cheap drones Replicator is now buying — a particular issue for American forces in the Middle East, who have spent the last year shooting down cheap weapons fired by Iran-backed militants using far more expensive interceptors.

To make sure Replicator drones can work together, the Pentagon is relying on commercial firms to provide what Hicks’ statement calls “integrated enablers,” or software that can coordinate “hundreds of thousands” of assets.

The statement said these will be able to resist jamming, which has destroyed countless drones during the war in Ukraine.

The Pentagon has also committed to announcing those awards at a later date.

On Monday, the Navy destroyers Stockdale and Spruance were attacked by Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen as the warships transited the Bab al-Mandeb strait that links the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, the Pentagon said.

The attack involved “at least eight attack drones, five anti-ship ballistic missiles and three anti-ship cruise missiles, which were successfully engaged and defeated,” Pentagon spokesman Air Force Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder told reporters Tuesday.

“The vessels were not damaged, no personnel were hurt,” he said.

Over the weekend, U.S. forces had struck Houthi storage sites housing “a variety of advanced conventional weapons,” Ryder said.

On Sunday, Iran-backed militants in Syria attacked U.S. forces at Mission Support Sight Green Village in Syria, using a mix of air drones and rockets, and no troops were injured in those attacks, Ryder said.

“Central Command took appropriate action again to protect our forces and send a clear message that attacks against our forces won’t be tolerated,” Ryder said. Neither he nor CENTCOM said what groups were responsible for the attacks on the American military — nor which groups were later targeted in response.

The U.S. hit nine targets across two sites “associated with Iranian groups” in Syria in response, according to CENTCOM.

There are around 900 American forces in Syria, fighting the terrorist group ISIS as part of an international coalition that will wind down over the next two years.

CENTCOM conducted a similar series of strikes in mid-October, and this latest round came in response to Houthi attacks on shipping vessels and American forces, Ryder said. Such attacks have been almost continuous over the last year as the Houthis have menaced commercial and military ships in the Red Sea following Israel’s war in Gaza.

The U.S. launched an international coalition to protect shipping in the corridor late last year, though most companies have rerouted their travel rather than risk damage in transit.

Israel’s military described the attack as “precise strikes on military targets in Iran,” without immediately elaborating.

“The regime in Iran and its proxies in the region have been relentlessly attacking Israel since Oct. 7 – on seven fronts – including direct attacks from Iranian soil,” an Israeli military statement said. “Like every other sovereign country in the world, the State of Israel has the right and the duty to respond.”

In Tehran, the Iranian capital, the sound of explosions could be heard, with state-run media there initially acknowledging the blasts and saying some of the sounds came from air defense systems around the city.

A Tehran resident told The Associated Press that at least seven explosions could be heard, which rattled the surrounding area. The resident spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

Meanwhile, state media in Syria described its air defenses as targeting “hostile targets” there as well.

Iran has launched two ballistic missile attacks on Israel in recent months amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip that began with the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Israel also has launched a ground invasion of Lebanon.

The strike happened just as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was arriving back in the U.S. after a tour of the Middle East where he and other U.S. officials had warned Israel to tender a response that would not further escalate the conflict in the region and exclude nuclear sites in Iran.

White House National Security Council spokesman Sean Savett said in a statement that “we understand that Israel is conducting targeted strikes against military targets in Iran” and referred reporters to the Israeli government for more details on their operation.

Israel had vowed to hit Iran hard following a massive Iranian missile barrage on Oct. 1. Iran said its barrage was in response to deadly Israeli attacks against its proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, and it has promised to respond to any retaliatory strikes.

Israel and Iran have been bitter foes since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Israel considers Iran to be its greatest threat, citing its leaders’ calls for Israel’s destruction, their support for anti-Israel militant groups and the country’s nuclear program.

Israel and Iran have been locked in a yearslong shadow war. A suspected Israeli assassination campaign has killed top Iranian nuclear scientists. Iranian nuclear installations have been hacked or sabotaged, all in mysterious attacks blamed on Israel. Meanwhile, Iran has been blamed for a series of attacks on shipping in the Middle East in recent years, which later grew into the attacks by Yemen’s Houthi rebels on shipping through the Red Sea corridor.

But since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, the battle has increasingly moved into the open. Israel has recently turned its attention to Hezbollah, which has been firing rockets into Israel since the war in Gaza began. Throughout the year, a number of top Iranian military figures have been killed in Israeli strikes in Syria and Lebanon.

Iran fired a wave of missiles and drones at Israel last April after two Iranian generals were killed in an apparent Israeli airstrike in Syria on an Iranian diplomatic post. The missiles and drones caused minimum damage, and Israel — under pressure from Western countries to show restraint — responded with a limited strike.

But after Iran’s early October missile strike, Israel promised a tougher response.

But that day heralded the start of a great upending for the U.S. Navy, after Hamas militants streamed into Israel and murdered more than 1,200 people, sparking a war that continues to threaten to engulf the Middle East to this day.

The moment that would change the Navy forever actually took place aboard the Carney 12 days later, on Oct. 19, when it became the first American warship to take out a barrage of Iran-backed Houthi rebel missiles and drones fired from Yemen.

Such intercepts have since become a harrowing, near-daily occurrence for destroyers in those waters, and the year that followed Oct. 19, 2023, has irrevocably changed the Navy for the foreseeable future, Navy leaders and outside analysts say.

On this day one year ago, starting around 4 p.m. local time, Carney took out a Houthi attack the Pentagon later said was headed for Israel, downing 15 drones and four land-attack cruise missiles over 10 hours.

While their pre-deployment training prepared them for anything, the Carney was not expecting to find itself taking on the Houthis in a near-daily battle to keep the claustrophobic Red Sea lanes open for commerce, Cmdr. Jeremy Robertson, the ship’s commanding officer for that cruise, told Navy Times this week.

“None of us really could have known what we were going to get into once Oct. 7 happened,” he said.

Since those fateful 10 hours a year ago, the Red Sea has become the arena for the longest sustained “direct and deliberate attacks at sea” that the fleet has faced since World War II, Fleet Forces Command head Adm. Daryl Caudle said in a statement to Navy Times.

“While I could not have predicted the complexity and interrelationships of all that has transpired since [Oct. 19, 2023], I am not surprised,” said Caudle, who commands the Navy East Coast-based fleet.

“The world is a very tense place right now given the vast range of power-seeking agendas between peer competitors and opportunistic regional proxies. Any small spark can have serious consequences, which is why we take every situation so seriously.”

Since Carney’s first victory, the surface fleet has subsequently honed its tactics and tuned its radars for such a fight, instances when a ship’s Combat Information Center sometimes has mere seconds to ascertain and take out a Houthi attack.

Combat lessons are being routed back to schoolhouses and training centers, giving the Navy real-time knowledge on its combat systems and how to best use them.

Skippers also report that their crews have been galvanized by such experiences, finding meaning to their seemingly endless training in the life-and-death minutes they endure in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.

“This really gave our sailors the why,” Robertson said. “Why do we train so hard, why do we do all the reps and sets.”

“The stage was not too big, the lights were not too bright. They were able to draw a connection.”

These successes at sea “validate our readiness to respond, our Sailors’ warfighting spirit and the technological superiority of our exquisite combat systems,” Caudle said.

But despite the tactical successes and demonstrated proficiencies, some question how fast the Navy is burning through munitions, sometimes to take out cheap Houthi drones, and whether a drawdown of missiles could one day impact a long-feared war with China in the West Pacific.

The Houthi menace in the Middle East has also caused the Navy’s aircraft carriers to be run hard, and some have been scrambled to the region when others weren’t ready to go, further raising readiness alarms in some corners.

And while tactical battles have been won, strategic wars have not, according to James Holmes, a retired Navy gunnery officer and professor of maritime strategy at the Naval War College.

“The tacticians have done their work magnificently … and the combination of sensors, fire control and weaponry has performed as advertised against an array of threats similar to what [Iran, Russia and China] field,” Holmes told Navy Times. “Bringing down anti-ship ballistic and cruise missiles is no easy feat, but they have done it.”

And while such successes will reverberate on other maritime battlefields, the Navy to date has been unable to stop the Houthis from attacking merchant vessels traveling through the vital economic waterway that is the Red Sea, he said.

“The failure part is that the mission has fallen short of its strategic goal, namely allowing merchant shipping through the Gulf of Aden, Bab el-Mandeb Strait, and Red Sea to resume unmolested,” Holmes said. “We can flip strategic failure to success when shipping firms — and the all-important maritime insurance companies — feel comfortable enough to start using that route again.”

A year in, the Navy is getting more judicious about how it fights Houthi attacks, according to Bryan Clark, a retired submarine officer and analyst at the Hudson Institute think tank.

Navy ships threw the “kitchen sink” at incoming drones and missiles after the Carney’s first intercept a year ago, but the fleet is becoming more adept at using electronic warfare, guns and less-expensive interceptors to counter such Houthi attacks, Clark said.

Questions of sustainability of effort are now arising, he said, noting that the Navy has in some instances used carrier-based fighter jets to shoot down Houthi drones and missiles, an expensive and inefficient approach.

“The challenge going forward will be how to sustain this level of presence in the region,” Clark said. “The Pentagon may need to consider putting missile defense systems on barges or ashore so [destroyers] can deploy elsewhere or return home for maintenance.”

Robertson left the Carney after it returned to Mayport, Florida, in May, and is now the Navy’s Surface Warfare Advanced Tactical Training, or SWATT, director, passing on his hard-earned knowledge.

“It’s certainly surreal,” he said of his time commanding Carney. “I love every one of the sailors and officers and chiefs I worked with. Just a great crew. They’ll remember this for the rest of their lives.”

As the one-year anniversary of Oct. 19 comes and goes with no end in sight for the Navy’s Red Sea fight against the Houthis, Caudle noted that it’s difficult to forecast how the conflict will end.

“While I won’t speculate on how our involvement with the Houthis will culminate, I can tell you that I’m laser-focused on readiness, sustainment and lethality,” he said. “We’re ready for this fight, no matter how long it lasts.”

Sinwar has topped Israel’s most wanted list since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war just over a year ago, and his killing strikes a powerful blow to the militant group. There was no immediate confirmation from Hamas of his death.

The military confirmed Sinwar’s death after conducting DNA tests on a body it said was among three militants killed Wednesday during operations in Gaza. Foreign Minister Israel Katz called Sinwar’s killing a “military and moral achievement for the Israeli army,” saying it would “create the possibility to immediately release the hostages.”

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant addressed Hamas fighters, saying it “is time to go out, release the hostages, raise your hands, surrender.”

Sinwar was one of the chief architects of Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel has vowed to kill him since the beginning of its retaliatory campaign in Gaza. He has been Hamas’ top leader inside the Gaza Strip for years, closely connected to its military wing while dramatically building up its capabilities.

An Israeli security official said it appeared that the man who turned out to be Sinwar was killed in a battle, not in a planned targeted airstrike.

Photos circulating online showed the body of a man resembling Sinwar with a gaping head wound, dressed in a military-style vest, half buried in the rubble of a destroyed building. The security official confirmed the photos were taken by Israeli security officials at the scene. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation.

The Israeli news site N12 said Sinwar appears to have been killed by chance in a battle on Wednesday. It said that troops tracked a group of militants into a building, then attacked the militants with tank fire, causing the building to collapse. As troops unearthed the dead militants, they noticed that one appeared to resemble Sinwar.

Sinwar was imprisoned by Israel from the late 1980s until 2011, and during that time he underwent treatment for brain cancer — leaving Israeli authorities with extensive medical records.

President Joe Biden has been briefed on Israel’s investigation into whether it killed Sinwar, and U.S. officials have been in close contact with Israeli officials throughout Thursday morning, according to a senior administration official.

Sinwar was chosen as Hamas’s top leader in July after his predecessor, Ismail Haniyeh, was assassinated in an apparent Israeli strike in the Iranian capital Tehran. Israel has also claimed to have killed the head of Hamas’ military wing Mohammed Deif in an airstrike, but the group has said he survived.

The report of his death came as Israeli forces continued a more than week-old major air and ground assault in the Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza. On Thursday, an Israeli strike hit a school sheltering displaced Palestinians, killing at least 28 people, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.

Fares Abu Hamza, head of the Gaza Health Ministry’s emergency unit in the north, said the dead included a woman and four children, correcting an earlier report of five children. He said dozens of people were wounded.

The Israeli military said it targeted a command center run by Hamas and Islamic Jihad inside the school. It provided a list of around a dozen names of people it identified as militants who were present when the strike was called in. It was not immediately possible to verify the names.

Israel has repeatedly struck tent camps and schools sheltering displaced people in Gaza. The Israeli military says it carries out precise strikes on militants and tries to avoid harming civilians, but its strikes often kill women and children.

Israel launched its campaign in Gaza to eliminate Hamas after the militants stormed into southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting around 250 others. Some 100 captives are still inside Gaza, about a third of whom are believed to be dead.

Israel’s offensive has killed over 42,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. It does not differentiate between civilians and combatants but says women and children make up a little more than half of the fatalities.

Northern Gaza was the first target of Israel’s ground invasion nearly a year ago and has suffered the heaviest destruction of the war, with entire neighborhoods in Gaza City and other towns reduced to rubble. Most of the population fled after Israel issued evacuation orders in the opening days of the war, but about 400,000 are believed to have remained despite the harsh conditions.

Earlier this month, Israel once again ordered the full-scale evacuation of the north, and allowed no food aid to enter the area for around two weeks. That led many Palestinians to fear that it had adopted a surrender-or-starve strategy suggested by former Israeli generals.

Israel allowed two shipments of aid to enter the north earlier this week after the United States warned it might reduce its military aid if its ally did not do more to address the humanitarian crisis.

Since the start of the conflict, Israeli forces have launched repeated operations into Jabaliya, a densely populated urban refugee camp dating back to the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation. The military says militants have repeatedly regrouped there after major operations.

Sami Magdy reported from Cairo. AP writers Jack Jeffery in Jerusalem and Kareem Chehayeb in Beirut, contributed to this report.

In Washington, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and Arab capitals, opponents and supporters of Israel’s offensive are offering clashing ideas about what the U.S. should do next, as its ally racks up tactical successes against Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen and presses its yearlong campaign to crush Hamas in Gaza.

Israel should get all the support it needs from the United States until Iran’s government “follows other dictatorships of the past into the dustbin of history,” said Richard Goldberg, a senior adviser at Washington’s conservative-leaning Foundation for the Defense of Democracies — calls echoed by some Israeli political figures.

Going further, Yoel Guzansky, a former senior staffer at Israel’s National Security Council, called for the Biden administration to join Israel in direct attacks in Iran. That would send “the right message to the Iranians — ‘Don’t mess with us,’” Guzansky said.

Critics, however, highlight lessons from the U.S. military campaign in Iraq and toppling of Saddam Hussein, when President George W. Bush ignored Arab warnings that the Iraqi dictator was the region’s indispensable counterbalance to Iranian influence. They caution against racking up military victories without adequately considering the risks, end goals or plans for what comes next, and warn of unintended consequences.

Ultimately, Israel “will be in a situation where it can only protect itself by perpetual war,” said Vali Nasr, who was an adviser to the Obama administration. Now a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, or SAIS, he has been one of the leading documenters of the rise of Iranian regional influence since the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

With Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu giving limited weight to Biden administration calls for restraint, the United States and its partners in the Middle East are “at the mercy of how far Bibi Netanyahu will push it,” Nasr said, referring to the Israeli leader by his nickname.

“It’s as if we hadn’t learned the lessons, or the folly, of that experiment … in Iraq in 2003 about reshaping the Middle East order,” said Randa Slim, a fellow at SAIS and researcher at the Washington-based Middle East Institute.

Advocates of Israel’s campaign hope for the weakening of Iran and its armed proxies that attack the U.S., Israel and their partners, oppress civil society and increasingly are teaming up with Russia and other Western adversaries.

Opponents warn that military action without resolving the grievances of Palestinians and others risks endless and destabilizing cycles of war, insurgency and extremist violence, and Middle East governments growing more repressive to try to control the situation.

And there’s the threat that Iran develops nuclear weapons to try to ensure its survival. Before the Israeli strikes on Hezbollah, Iranian leaders concerned about Israel’s offensives had made clear that they were interested in returning to negotiations with the U.S. on their nuclear program and claimed interest in improved relations overall.

In just weeks, Israeli airstrikes and intelligence operations have devastated the leadership, ranks and arsenals of Lebanon-based Hezbollah — which had been one of the Middle East’s most powerful fighting forces and Iran’s overseas bulwark against attacks on Iranian territory — and hit oil infrastructure of Yemen’s Iran-allied Houthis.

A year of Israeli airstrikes in Gaza appears to have reduced the leadership of Iranian-allied Hamas to a few survivors hiding in underground tunnels. However, Israeli forces again engaged in heavy fighting there this week, and Hamas was able to fire rockets at Tel Aviv in a surprising show of enduring strength on the Oct. 7 anniversary of the militant group’s attack on Israel, which started the war.

Anticipated Israeli counterstrikes on Iran could accelerate regional shifts in power. The response would follow Iran launching ballistic missiles at Israel last week in retaliation for killings of Hezbollah and Hamas leaders.

It also could escalate the risk of all-out regional war that U.S. President Joe Biden — and decades of previous administrations — worked to avert.

The expansion of Israeli attacks since late last month has sidelined mediation by the U.S., Egypt and Qatar for a cease-fire and hostage release deal in Gaza. U.S. leaders say Israel did not warn them before striking Hezbollah leaders in Lebanon but have defended the surge in attacks, while still pressing for peace.

Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, said in an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes” aired Monday that the U.S. was dedicated to supplying Israel with the military aid needed to protect itself but would keep pushing to end the conflict.

“We’re not going to stop in terms of putting that pressure on Israel and in the region, including Arab leaders,” she said.

Israel’s expanded strikes raise for many what is the tempting prospect of weakening Iran’s anti-Western, anti-Israel alliance with like-minded armed groups in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen to governments in Russia and North Korea.

Called the “Axis of Resistance,” Iran’s military alliances grew — regionally, then globally — after the U.S. invasion of Iraq removed Saddam, who had fought an eight-year war against Iran’s ambitious clerical regime.

But the unintended effects of the U.S. intervention were even bigger, including the rise of Iran’s Axis of Resistance and new extremist groups, including the Islamic State.

“An emboldened and expansionist Iran appears to be the only victor” of the 2003 Iraq war, notes a U.S. Army review of lessons learned.

“Two decades ago, who could have seen a day when Iran was supporting Russia with arms? The reason is because of its increased influence” after the U.S. overthrow of Saddam, said Ihsan Alshimary, professor of political science at Baghdad University.

Even more than in 2003, global leaders are offering little clear idea on how the shifts in power that Israel’s military is putting in motion will end — for Iran, Israel, the Middle East at large, and the United States.

Iran and its allies are being weakened, said Goldberg, at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. So is U.S. influence as it appears to be dragged along by Israel, Nasr said.

The conflict could end up hurting Israel if it bogs down in a ground war in Lebanon, for example, said Mehran Kamrava, a professor and Middle East expert at Georgetown University in Qatar.

After four decades of deep animosity between Israeli and Iranian leaders, “the cold war between them has turned into a hot war. And this is significantly changing — is bound to change — the strategic landscape in the Middle East,” he said.

“We are certainly at the precipice of change,” Kamrava said. But “the direction and nature of that change is very hard to predict at this stage.”

Hamas marked the anniversary of its Oct. 7, 2023, attack by firing a barrage of rockets at Tel Aviv, underscoring its resilience after a year of war and devastation in Gaza. Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which began firing rockets at Israel on Oct. 8 in support of its ally Hamas, fired more than 170 rockets despite its recent losses.

The conflict soon drew in the United States military as well, and troops levels there remain higher than normal in order to prevent a bigger war from breaking out.

A few weeks after Hamas’ attack, on Oct. 19, the Navy destroyer Carney became the first American warship to take out a salvo of drones and missiles fired by Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.

That back-and-forth between the Houthis and the Navy has continued on a near-daily clip for the past year in the Red Sea and Gulf of Oman, and Navy ships have also played a role in shooting down Iranian missiles fired at Israel on two occasions.

U.S. ground forces have also endured months of attacks by Iran-backed militias in Syria and Iraq, although the frequency of such attacks has lessened.

Still, a January attack on the Tower 22 base on Jordan’s border with Syria killed three U.S. troops.

They are Sgt. Kennedy Sanders, Sgt. Breonna Moffett and Staff Sgt. William Rivers.

Questions have also emerged about how long the U.S. military — and the Navy in particular — can keep expending finite resources in the region.

As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to press Israel’s campaigns on all sides, the military bombarded southern Lebanon with more than 120 strikes in an hour Monday, saying it was targeting Hezbollah positions. An earlier strike killed at least 10 Lebanese firefighters, the latest of dozens of first responders killed in recent weeks, according to Lebanon ‘s Health Ministry.

In a possible sign of the expansion of its campaign, the military said it would soon launch operations on Lebanon’s southern coast, telling residents to stay off the beaches and the sea for a 36-mile stretch along the Mediterranean.

In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Israeli troops shot and killed a 12-year-old Palestinian boy in a refugee camp, Palestinian health officials said. The military said it opened fire on Palestinians throwing stones at its forces.

A year since Hamas’ surprise cross-border attack, the war in Gaza rages on even as Israel is fighting a new war against Hezbollah, escalating its bombing campaign in Lebanon the past three weeks. There is also a mounting conflict with Iran — which backs both Hamas and Hezbollah — that threatens to drag the region into an even more dangerous conflagration.

And within Israel, two main commemorations for the day underscored the country’s divisions. One was held by the government, the other in Tel Aviv by families of those killed on Oct. 7 and of hostages still held in Gaza who refused to join the official ceremony.

It was a sign of how Israelis’ faith in their leaders and military were shaken when the militants stormed out of Gaza, catching the country unprepared on a major Jewish holiday. The militants killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted another 250. Around 100 hostages have not been returned, a third of whom are believed to be dead, and cease-fire efforts have ground to a halt.

No formal commemorative event is planned in Gaza, where Israel’s assault since Oct. 7 has killed more than 41,000 Palestinians, huge areas have been completely destroyed, most of the population have been driven from their homes and hunger is widespread.

At 6:31 a.m., four projectiles were launched from Gaza toward the same communities that came under attack last year, without disrupting ceremonies there.

The military said another five rockets were launched from the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis toward central Israel, setting off air raid sirens in Tel Aviv. Two women were lightly wounded, according to first responders, and there was minor damage. The military said it struck the launch sites.

Sirens blared a second time in central Israel hours later when Yemen’s Houthi rebels fired a ballistic missile. The military said the missile was intercepted.

Israel responded to the Oct. 7 attack by launching one of the deadliest and most destructive military campaigns in recent history.

“We lost everything we have,” said Liyala al-Shanar, who fled her home in Gaza City. “We live in a tent that doesn’t protect us from the winter cold or the summer heat.”

Hamas’ fighters have repeatedly regrouped in areas where Israel carried out major operations. On Sunday, Israeli forces encircled the northern town of Jabaliya and launched another major operation there that the military says is aimed at rooting out militants.

The past year has seen a surge of violence in the West Bank, including Israeli raids on towns targeting armed groups, increased attacks by Palestinian militants and Jewish settler attacks on Palestinians.

In Lebanon, Hezbollah has kept up its fire even after intensified Israeli strikes have killed many in its top command — including longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah — and pounded large areas of Lebanon.

Israel’s strikes have killed at least 1,400 Lebanese, including civilians, medics and Hezbollah fighters, and 1.2 million have been driven from their homes. Lebanon’s Health Ministry said Monday’s strike that killed the 10 firefighters hit the municipality of the southern town of Baraachit just as they prepared for a mission. There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military.

Israel launched what has so far been a limited ground operation across the border last week. It says it aims to drive the militant group from its border so tens of thousands of Israeli citizens can return home.

Israel has also vowed to respond to a ballistic missile attack last week that Iran said was in response to the killings of Nasrallah, top Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and one of its own Revolutionary Guard generals.

Hezbollah said Monday it would continue its attacks until there is a cease-fire in Gaza, saying Israel “was and will remain a deadly, aggressive, cancerous gland that must be eliminated, no matter how long it takes.”

Military aircraft and warships bombed Houthi strongholds at roughly five locations, according to the officials.

Houthi media said seven strikes hit the airport in Hodeida, a major port city, and the Katheib area, which has a Houthi-controlled military base. Four more strikes hit the Seiyana area in Sanaa, the capital, and two strikes hit the Dhamar province. The Houthi media office also reported three air raids in Bayda province, southeast of Sanaa.

The strikes come just days after the Houthis threatened “escalating military operations” targeting Israel after they apparently shot down a U.S. military drone flying over Yemen. And just last week, the group claimed responsibility for an attack targeting American warships.

The rebels fired more than a half dozen ballistic missiles and anti-ship cruise missiles and two drones at three U.S. ships that were traveling through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, but all were intercepted by the Navy destroyers, according to several U.S. officials.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss details not yet publicly released.

Houthis have targeted more than 80 merchant vessels with missiles and drones since the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza started last October. They have seized one vessel and sunk two in the campaign that has also killed four sailors.

Other missiles and drones have either been intercepted by a U.S.-led coalition in the Red Sea or failed to reach their targets, which have included Western military vessels.

The group has maintained that they target ships linked to Israel, the U.S. or the United Kingdom to force an end to Israel’s campaign against Hamas in Gaza. However, many of the ships attacked have little or no connection to the conflict, including some bound for Iran.

Pentagon spokesman Air Force Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder declined to say what kind of ordnance was used by the warships Cole and Bulkeley, or whether their intercept were successful, but he said the operations took place while both ships were in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea.

Iran’s direct and widespread missile attack on Israel Tuesday was the second of the year, and once again threatened to spark all-out war in the Middle East, a grim future that the United States has worked to stave off since the Palestinian militant group Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7.

The sky lit up over central and southern Israel Tuesday evening as ballistic missiles collided with air defense interceptors. Both the Pentagon and the Israel Defense Forces said they were still assessing the attack, but that Iran had launched around 200 missiles and there had been no recorded casualties.

“Initial reports indicate that Israel was able to intercept the majority of incoming missiles and that there was minimal damage on the ground,” Ryder said.

National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan called Iran’s response “failed and ineffective,” but warned that it was also a “significant escalation.”

“This [result] was first and foremost the result of the professionalism of the IDF, but in no small part, because of the skilled work of the U.S. military and meticulous joint planning in anticipation of the attack,” Sullivan said.

Iran’s attack comes a week after Israel assassinated the leader of Hezbollah, a Lebanese militia group that Tehran has armed for years. The strike in Beirut, followed by operations Israel launched across the border, have escalated a burgeoning conflict in Lebanon.

The U.S. has already surged forces to the Middle East to help defend Israel and its own forces. It continued to do so this week, sending three fighter squadrons, including F-15s, F-16s and A-10s. This almost doubles the number of fighters in U.S. Central Command, which oversees American military operations in the Middle East.

Over the weekend, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin also ordered the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln to remain in the region as a bulwark against a wider war. Another carrier, the Harry S. Truman, is heading to U.S. European Command.

These posture changes will add “a few thousand” U.S. forces to CENTCOM, according to the Pentagon, adding to the 40,000 already there — 6,000 more than normal.

The U.S. insists the surge in forces has helped avert an a wider war in the region, an assessment Ryder repeated from the podium Tuesday, despite the recent attacks.

“We’ve been working very hard from the beginning to prevent a wider regional conflict.,” he said. “Certainly, the type of aggressive action that we saw by Iran today makes that more challenging.”

American forces, meanwhile, are under an elevated threat from Iran-backed proxies in the region.

Last week, the Houthis, a militia group in Yemen, launched what the Pentagon called a “complex attack” with aerial drones and cruise missiles on U.S. ships in the Red Sea, though officials said no ships were struck and no sailors were injured.

Iran’s attack Tuesday included around two times as many ballistic missiles than a similar barrage this April, which largely featured aerial drones that are much easier to intercept, Ryder said. No U.S. forces were targeted in the attack Tuesday, he continued.

Austin spoke with his Israeli counterpart to discuss the attack and the “severe consequences” that would follow for Iran. Ryder wouldn’t elaborate on what those consequences will be, nor whether the U.S. would assist Israel in a direct strike on Iranian territory.