Rockets rained on southern Israel, hours after a wave of Israeli airstrikes in Gaza killed at least 12 people, including a senior militant and a five-year-old girl.
The Associated PressSmoke rises after Israeli airstrikes on a building in Gaza City on Saturday.The fighting began with Israel's killing of a senior commander of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant group in a wave of strikes Friday that Israel said were meant to prevent an imminent attack. A five-year-old girl and two women are among those killed in the strikes.
Palestinians inspect a damaged residential building after it was hit by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza on Saturday. The lone power plant in Gaza ground to a halt at noon Saturday for lack of fuel as Israel has kept its crossing points into Gaza closed since Tuesday. With the new disruption, Gazans can get only four hours of electricity a day, increasing their reliance on private generators and deepening the territory's chronic power crisis amid peak summer heat.Throughout the day, Gaza militants regularly launched rounds of rockets into southern Israel, but there were no reports of casualties.
"This government has a zero-tolerance policy for any attempted attacks — of any kind — from Gaza towards Israeli territory," he said. "Israel will not sit idly by when there are those who are trying to harm its civilians." Hamas also faces a dilemma in deciding whether to join a new battle barely a year after the last war caused widespread devastation. There has been almost no reconstruction since then, and the isolated coastal territory is mired in poverty, with unemployment hovering around 50 per cent. Israel and Egypt have maintained a tight blockade over the territory since the Hamas takeover in 2007.
The latest round of Israel-Gaza violence was rooted in the arrest earlier this week of a senior Islamic Jihad leader in the West Bank, part of a month-long Israeli military operation in the territory. A teen Islamic Jihad member was also killed in a gunbattle.
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