The armed wing of Palestinian Hamas said on Sunday it had targeted Tel Aviv with a “major barrage of rockets” in a message posted on Telegram after the Israeli army claimed at least eight rockets had been fired from the Gaza Strip towards Israel.
“We bombarded Tel Aviv with a heavy barrage of rockets in response to the Zionist massacres against civilians,” the Ezzedine al-Qassam brigades wrote in their message posted online a few minutes after warning sirens sounded in the central Israel according to AFP journalists.
Earlier, the Israeli army said in a statement that eight rockets had been fired towards the center of the country from the “Rafah region”, in the far south of the Gaza Strip, where intense fighting is currently taking place. to the Palestinian armed movements.
The army said “a number” of rockets were intercepted by the air defense system, without giving further details. An AFP journalist heard at least three explosions in the air.
An AFP correspondent in the Gaza Strip said she saw rockets fired from Rafah.
Warning sirens sounded early in the afternoon in Tel Aviv and central Israel for residents to take shelter after rocket attacks.
The Israeli emergency service, Magen David Adom (MDA), said its teams had only identified one patient who was slightly injured while going to a shelter.
The war was sparked by the Hamas attack on October 7 which resulted in the deaths of more than 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli figures.
Of the 252 people taken as hostages on October 7, 121 are still being held in Gaza, including 37 dead according to the army.
Israel vowed to destroy Hamas and launched a devastating offensive in the Gaza Strip in retaliation, resulting in the deaths of at least 35,984 people, most of them civilians, according to data from Hamas’s health ministry in Gaza.