Gaza militants have fired rockets and Israel carried out air strikes across the Israel-Gaza frontier, a day after 11 Palestinian were killed during a Israeli raid in the occupied West Bank, renewing concerns of broader escalation.
Mediation efforts were under way by Egypt and the United Nations to calm the situation, officials said on Thursday.
Israel’s military said six rockets had been fired from the Gaza Strip overnight, setting off air raid sirens in southern Israeli communities. Five rockets had been intercepted by missile defences and the other had fallen in an open area. No injuries were reported.
The Palestinian militant faction Islamic Jihad stopped short of directly claiming responsibility for the rocket attack on Thursday but said it had the right to defend against Israeli aggression.
Israeli fighter jets had later struck a weapons manufacturing site belonging to Hamas, the Islamist group that controls Gaza, the Israeli military said. No injuries were reported.
The cross-border attacks followed an Israeli operation in the West Bank city of Nablus on Wednesday. Israeli troops had killed 11 Palestinians, including at least four gunmen and four civilians, and wounded more than 100 people, Palestinian sources said.
The Israeli army said troops there had tried detaining militants suspected of planning imminent attacks when they had come under fire and shot back.
Read the article by Nidal Al-Mughrabi in The Canberra Times.