On Monday evening, the alarm sirens sounded in southern Israel. Sign that a rocket, the first fired in months, touched the ground of the Hebrew territory. “A rocket was fired from the Gaza Strip into Israeli territory and was intercepted by the Iron Dome defense system,” the Israeli military said in a statement. The projectile sank at sea, off the Tel Aviv metropolis. It proves that local tensions presently offer no prospect of appeasement.
This new rocket attack has not been claimed, but it comes after a series of attacks in Israel, two of which were perpetrated by Palestinians in Tel Aviv. Since March 22, they have killed 14 people. They led to violent military “counterterrorism” operations in the occupied West Bank, and a tense weekend at holy sites in Jerusalem. Thus, 22 Palestinians, including assailants, were killed in incidents or these Israeli operations.
In Jerusalem, more than 150 Palestinians were injured in clashes with Israeli forces on Friday at the Jerusalem Mosque compound, Islam’s third holiest site, also considered Judaism’s first holiest site under its name of Mount of the Temple.
Sunday, new skirmishes had broken out in and around this holy place that Jews had gone to visit, which was considered an affront by some Muslims. And young Palestinians were arrested the same day after throwing stones at Israeli civilian buses near the scene.
Ramadan revives a latent conflict
Last year, clashes in Jerusalem during the same period of the year led Hamas to launch salvoes of rockets from Gaza towards Israel, which responded by bombarding this Palestinian territory of 2.3 million inhabitants, giving rise to to a deadly 11-day war.
Israeli security sources and analysts have repeated in recent weeks that Hamas, which has welcomed recent attacks in Israel, does not want a war this year, citing mainly two reasons: first, the movement’s military capabilities have been affected by the May 2021 war. And secondly because in the event of a conflict, the new Israeli government risks suspending the thousands of work permits granted in recent months to workers in Gaza, a territory under blockade weighed down by a local unemployment rate of around 50%.
On Monday, the Islamic Jihad, the main Palestinian armed Islamist group after Hamas, but which unlike it does not administer the Gaza Strip, threatened a new military escalation. “We can no longer remain silent about what is happening in Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank,” said Ziad al-Nakhale, the leader of Islamic Jihad, whose movement has thousands of fighters and soldiers according to Israeli intelligence. rockets in Gaza.
“Illegal and provocative Israeli violence”
The recent incidents at the Al-Masjid Square have also cooled relations slightly between Israel and Jordan, which has summoned the Israeli charge d’affaires in Amman to demand an end to “illegal and provocative Israeli violations” at the Al-Masjid Al-Masjid. Mosques.
Jordan, linked to Israel by a peace treaty since 1994, administers the esplanade of the Mosques, where the al-Aqsa mosque and the dome of the rock are located, but access to this place is controlled by Israel. This summons “harms efforts to restore calm to Jerusalem”, retorted the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
“The statements accusing Israel of the violence that is directed against us are serious and unacceptable (…) it is a reward for those who stir up violence,” added Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who finds himself weakened by recent events.