Palestinian militants yesterday kept up their most intense rocket fire on Israel since the 2014 Gaza war, drawing Israeli airstrikes against Hamas’ TV station and other targets.
The flare-up, in which five Palestinians, four of them militants, and a civilian in Israel were killed, threatened to derail efforts by the UN, Egypt and Qatar to broker a long-term truce and head off another major conflict in the impoverished enclave.
Hamas, Gaza’s dominant Islamist movement, and other armed factions launched more than 400 rockets or mortar bombs across the border after carrying out a surprise guided missile attack on Monday on a bus that wounded an Israeli soldier, the Israeli military said.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Hamas said that it was retaliating for a botched Israeli commando raid in Gaza that killed one of its commanders and six other gunmen.
An Israeli colonel was also killed in the raid.
Sirens in southern Israeli towns and the port of Ashkelon sent residents rushing to bomb shelters, while several homes were hit.
The military said Israel’s Iron Dome anti-rocket system intercepted more than 100 rockets and mortar bombs.
Israel responded with dozens of airstrikes against Gaza buildings, including a Hamas intelligence compound and the al-Aqsa TV studios, whose employees had received advance warnings from the military to evacuate.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday convened his security Cabinet to discuss Israel’s next moves, and the military said it had sent infantry and armored reinforcements to the Gaza border.
A statement issued by militant groups in Gaza said Ashdod, a major Israeli port, and Beersheba, the biggest city in southern Israel, would be hit next if Israel did not cease fire.
Egypt urged Israel to back down. The US, whose peace mediation has been stalled since a seven-week war in 2014, condemned Hamas.
“The escalation in the past 24 hours is EXTREMELY dangerous and reckless,” UN Middle East envoy Nickolay Mladenov said on Twitter. “Rockets must STOP, restraint must be shown by all!”
Israeli military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Conricus said the military estimated that Hamas and the Islamic Jihad group have more than 20,000 rockets and mortars of varying calibers and ranges that are capable of reaching Israel’s main cities of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Violence has simmered since Palestinians launched weekly border protests on March 30 to demand the easing of a blockade on Gaza and rights to lands lost in the 1948 war of Israel’s founding.
Israeli troops have killed more that 220 Palestinians during the confrontations, which have included border breaches.
A Qatari cash infusion of US$15 million last week appeared to dampen Gazan anger.
On Sunday, Netanyahu said he hoped to reach an “arrangement” to avoid another Gaza war and ease Palestinian economic hardship.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS