In the early hours of Tuesday, 9 May, about 40 Israeli military aircraft took to the sky. They were targeting three senior commanders of Gaza’s Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) terrorist organisation.
Owing to high-quality intelligence and precision weaponry, they swiftly ended the lives of PIJ’s northern area commander, Khalil Bahtini, PIJ senior operative Jihad Ghanem, and Tareq Izz ed-Din, in charge of PIJ’s outreach into the West Bank, an area ostensibly under Palestinian Authority (PA) control. A forth PIJ commander was killed by Israel on the morning of 11 May.
Several Palestinian civilians, including at least four children, were also killed in the Israeli attacks, comprising family members of the targeted PIJ leaders and bystanders.
Shortly after the initial attacks, the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) also bombed PIJ weapons depots and bases, and struck PIJ cells attempting to shoot rockets and anti-tank missiles launched from the strip towards Israel.
PIJ is a relatively small but particularly radical and violent Iran-funded and armed terrorist group based primarily in Gaza. Following the early-May death of a PIJ leader in an Israeli prison following a hunger strike, PIJ fired more than 100 rockets and mortars towards nearby Israeli towns.
The narrow Gaza Strip, home to more than two million Palestinians, is controlled by the much more powerful and disciplined jihadist organisation Hamas. Since taking over the area in a bloody coup in 2007 against PA control, Hamas has ruled Gaza in an oppressive, authoritarian fashion, terrorising civilians.
Read the article by Ran Porat in Monash Lens.