Gaza: Palestinian militants in Gaza fired dozens of rockets into Israel on Friday in response to Israeli airstrikes which killed at least 10 people, including a senior commander of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement.
As darkness fell, Israeli authorities said sirens had been sounded in southern and central areas, while images broadcast by Israeli television stations appeared to show a number of missiles being shot down by air defence systems. In Tel Aviv, Israel’s economic centre, witnesses said they could hear booms but there were no reports of sirens.
Islamic Jihad, a militant group with a similar ideology to Hamas, the Islamist movement in charge of Gaza, said it had fired more than 100 rockets on Friday into Israeli cities, including Tel Aviv. Israel’s ambulance service said there were no reports of casualties.
The strikes came a little more than a year after an 11-day war between Israel and Hamas in May 2021, which killed at least 250 people in Gaza and 13 in Israel and left the blockaded enclave’s economy shattered.
Earlier, local health officials in Gaza said at least 10 people, including a five-year-old child, had been killed and 55 wounded in the Israeli airstrikes, which came after days of escalating tensions following the arrest of a Palestinian militant leader during the week.
An Israeli spokesperson said the strikes had killed Islamic Jihad commander Tayseer al-Jaabari and around 15 “terrorists” but said the military did not have a final casualty total.
Read the article by Nidal Al-Mughrabi in The Age.