![]() “The enemy has started a war targeting our people and we all need to defend ourselves and our people,” an Islamic Jihad statement said. Israel closed crossings into the Gaza Strip this week in anticipation of a retaliatory attack following the arrest in the West Bank.Īfter the airstrikes, Islamic Jihad said it would respond with force, and cities in southern Israel opened bomb shelters in anticipation of rocket fire from Gaza. “Israel will not allow the terrorist organizations to set the agenda in the Gaza Strip and threaten the citizens of the State of Israel,” Prime Minister Yair Lapid of Israel said shortly after the attack. Israel said that Islamic Jihad had been poised to respond with a revenge attack, and that it had targeted Mr. Israel arrested one of the group’s senior commanders in the West Bank this week, leading to threats of reprisal from its Gaza leadership. The airstrikes followed almost a week of rising tensions between Israel and Islamic Jihad, which often acts independently of Hamas. Both Israel and Hamas, the militant group that dominates Gaza, had signaled they sought to avoid another full-scale war over the enclave, which has been under an Israeli and Egyptian blockade since 2007.īut the violence on Friday drew warnings of retaliation from Palestinian militant groups and raised the possibility of extended conflict. After the war in May 2021, there were relatively few cross-border exchanges of fire, as tensions shifted to the occupied West Bank. The escalation followed one of the least violent phases in Gaza for several years. One airstrike killed Taysir al-Jabari, a senior military leader in Islamic Jihad, the second-largest militant group in Gaza, according to both Islamic Jihad and the Israeli military. The strikes hit residential apartments as well as militant watchtowers, killing at least 10 people including a 5-year-old girl, and wounding 55, the Gaza health ministry said. TEL AVIV - Israeli airstrikes hit several targets in the Gaza Strip on Friday, killing a number of people including a senior commander of a Palestinian militant group, in the deadliest escalation of violence in the territory since an 11-day war last year. Israel carried out a number of airstrikes on the Gaza Strip, with one of the strikes killing a senior figure of Islamic Jihad, the Palestinian militant group said. ![]()
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