(Jerusalem) The Israeli army on Saturday carried out strikes on positions of the Palestinian movement Hamas in the Gaza Strip in response to a rocket attack from this territory which was intercepted, according to a military statement.
Updated yesterday at 3:14 p.m.
Before dawn, alarm sirens sounded in the city of Ashkelon and other localities in southern Israel, bordering the Gaza Strip, to alert of a rocket attack.
“The Islamist movement Hamas fired a rocket from the Gaza Strip at Israeli citizens in southern Israel. The rocket was intercepted by the anti-missile shield,” the Israeli army said in its statement.
In retaliation, the army carried out a series of strikes on Hamas positions in the Palestinian enclave, which has been under an Israeli blockade since 2007, when Hamas took power there.
“Planes targeted a Hamas weapons manufacturing site as well as three military posts” of the movement, the army said.
The Israeli raids, carried out in particular in the southeast of Gaza City, constitute “an extension of the aggression (by Israel) of the Palestinian lands in Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank”, after the death of three Palestinians in Jenin, declared Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem, who did not report casualties from the strikes.
On Friday, three armed Palestinians were killed in exchanges of fire with Israeli forces carrying out an operation in the Jenin area of the West Bank, a Palestinian territory occupied by Israel for more than 50 years.
Hamas claimed that one of the three dead was a local commander of the Islamist movement and that his death “will not go unpunished”.
On Saturday evening, Israel announced that it was suspending the increase in the number of entry permits to its territory granted to Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, announced earlier in the week.
The Jewish state said Thursday it planned to increase the number of permits by 2,000, to reach a total of 14,000 per day.
“Defense Minister Benny Gantz has decided to suspend the increase […] in response to the firing of a rocket towards the State of Israel,” Cogat, the body of the Israeli Ministry of Defense which oversees civilian activities in the Palestinian Territories, said in a statement.
The last Israeli rocket attacks and strikes on Gaza date back to last April.