Israel yesterday faced an escalating conflict on two fronts, scrambling to quell riots between Arabs and Jews on its own streets after days of exchanging deadly fire with Palestinian militants in Gaza.
Despite diplomatic efforts to ease the crisis, which US President Joe Biden said he hoped would end “sooner than later,” hundreds of rockets flew across the Gaza Strip overnight.
Air raid warnings went off across Israel, including for the first time in the country’s north.
Photo: AFP
Israel’s air force said it had launched multiple strikes, targeting what it described as locations linked to the “counterintelligence infrastructure” of Hamas, the Islamist group that controls Gaza, as well as the house of Iyad Tayeb, one of the movement’s commanders.
In Gaza, 67 people had been killed and nearly 400 injured.
On Wednesday, Hamas announced the death of its military chief in Gaza City, Bassem Issa, with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) saying it had killed three other senior figures as well.
Photo: Reuters
Israel said that about 1,500 rockets had been launched into its territory since the beginning of the week by Palestinian militants.
Seven people had been killed, including one six-year-old after a rocket struck his home in southern Israel, the United Hatzalah volunteer rescue agency said.
Coinciding with the aerial bombardments is violence between Arabs and Jews inside Israel.
On Wednesday, Israeli groups took to the streets across the country, clashing with security forces and Arab Israelis.
Police said they had responded to violent incidents in multiple towns, including Lod, Acre and Haifa.
Israeli television aired footage of people beating a man they considered an Arab until he lay unconscious on his back in a street of Bat Yam, near Tel Aviv.
“The victim of the lynching is seriously injured, but stable,” Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Hospital said, without identifying him.
A state of emergency has been declared in the mixed Jewish-Arab city of Lod, where a synagogue and other Jewish property has been torched, and an Arab resident was shot dead.
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin denounced what he described as a “pogrom” in which “an incited and bloodthirsty Arab mob” had injured people.
“What has been happening these last few days in Israeli towns is unacceptable... Nothing justifies the lynching of Arabs by Jews and nothing justifies the lynching of Jews by Arabs,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, adding that Israel was fighting a battle “on two fronts.”
An emergency UN Security Council meeting on the tensions has been requested for today, diplomatic sources told reporters.
The council has already held two closed-door videoconferences since Monday, with the US opposing adoption of a joint declaration, which it said would not “help de-escalate” the situation.
Netanyahu spoke later on Wednesday with Biden.
“My expectation and hope is that this’ll be closing down sooner than later, but Israel has a right to defend itself when you have thousands of rockets flying into your territory,” Biden told reporters at the White House on Wednesday.
Additional reporting by Bloomberg
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