Israeli jet fighters struck Hamas sites after militants fired rockets from Gaza on Thursday, the Israeli military said, raising fears of a wider conflict after a raid in the occupied West Bank left 11 Palestinians dead.
The Israeli military said it bombarded a weapons-manufacturing facility affiliated with Hamas, the de facto rulers of the Gaza Strip and a US and Australian-designated terror group. Israeli forces also attacked a Hamas military site in Jabalia in northern Gaza.
Palestinian officials in Gaza didn’t report any injuries, although the site was located in a residential neighbourhood near a school and a health clinic.
The Israeli military slammed Hamas for “placing its military assets in the midst of the civilian population”.
Hamas vowed the strikes wouldn’t stop its actions against Israel and said “the response to the occupation’s aggression will remain”.
The Israeli strikes followed the firing of six rockets from the Gaza Strip, the coastal Palestinian enclave ruled by Hamas. Israel’s Iron Dome air- defence system shot down five while a sixth fell in an open area, the Israeli military said.
Both Hamas and Iran-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad had threatened retaliation on Wednesday following the deadly raid in Nablus’s Old City, although neither took responsibility for Thursday’s rocket fire. A spokesman for Hamas’s military wing warned that the Gaza militants’ patience “was running out”.
Read the article by Aaron Boxerman in The Australian.