Time.news – Israel has launched a series of air strikes on the Gaza Strip in the early hours of today, an action to which the Palestinian side reacted by launching rockets in what is a new escalation of tensions in the region.
The night attacks – which the Israeli military confirmed in a statement – were launched a few hours after a rocket was intercepted launched from the Palestinian territory. The emergency services did not report any casualties on either side.
According to local security sources and witnesses, the first round of attacks – at least seven – hit a training center of the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas.
The center is located in the Al-Maghazi refugee camp in the central part of the Gaza Strip. A second round of airstrikes hit the al-Qassam Brigade training center southwest of Gaza.
An Israeli military statement claims that fighter planes have “hit a production siteconservation and storage of chemical raw materials together with a “weapons production site” belonging to Hamas.
The attacks came “in response to rocket fire from the Gaza Strip towards Israel” on Wednesday. After the attacks, journalists and witnesses saw fresh rocket fire from Gaza and new explosions were heard from Gaza City around 0200 GMT.
These new actions come after cross-border rocket fire from the Gaza Strip last week in retaliation for a deadly Israeli raid on the occupied West Bank, and a gun attack outside a synagogue in East Jerusalem that killed seven civilians.
It was the deadliest attack against Israeli civilians in more than a decade and was celebrated by many Palestinians in Gaza and across the West Bank, where bloodshed is also on the rise.
Israeli forces killed 10 people from Jenin refugee camp in their deadliest raid on the West Bank in nearly two decades last week. Israel claimed that Islamic Jihad militants were the target of the operation.
Gaza, densely populated by 2.3 million people, has been under an Israeli blockade since Hamas took power in 2007. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) – a secular Palestinian armed group – said on Thursday, after the airstrikes, of having carried out “a barrage of rockets … in response to the Zionist aggression on the Gaza Strip”.
Alarm sirens have sounded in Sderot, a city in southern Israel near the Gaza Strip, according to the military. -Jericho ‘siege’-On Wednesday, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s fire said the recent rocket attack was due to his decision to close two makeshift bakeries run by Palestinian activists in Israeli prisons. He called the bakeries part of the unwarranted “benefits” to which the “terrorists” were subject.
“The launch from Gaza will not weaken my determination to continue working to change the conditions of the summer camps of the murderous terrorists,” the minister said. The escalation of violence has affected large parts of the West Bank, with 2022 the deadliest year since the United Nations began tracking the victims in the occupied territory in 2005.
About 235 people died in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict last year, with nearly 90 percent of the victims on the Palestinian side, according to AFP data. In January alone, Israeli forces killed 35 Palestinians, including assailants, militants and civilians, while Friday’s attack on East Jerusalem killed six Israelis, including a child, and a Ukrainian.
The Palestinian regional governor on Wednesday accused Israel of “sieging” Jericho – a tourist destination near Jerusalem in the West Bank – after a shooting at a restaurant on Saturday that left no victims.
“This is the fifth day of the siege of Jericho,” Governor Jihad Abu al-Assal told AFP. The Israeli army told AFP it has boosted its forces in the area and “inspections at city entrances and exits have been increased”.
An AFP correspondent said cars were stopped at the entrances to the city, with checkpoints getting in and out of the city often taking hours. During a recent visit to the region to meet with Israeli and Palestinian leaders, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken called on both sides to take “urgent steps” to restore calm.
Washington has no contacts with Hamas, which he considers a terrorist organization. Islamic Jihad said it will send a delegation led by militant group leader Ziad al-Nakhala to Cairo at Egypt’s invitation.
The delegation will meet the head of Egypt’s secret services to discuss “how to restore calm, especially after the latest escalation, including attacks against prisoners,” said Daoud Shihab, a senior member of Islamic Jihad in Gaza.