Israeli warplanes raided the Gaza Strip before dawn on Saturday in what it said was a retaliatory strike for rocket fire from the Palestinian territory controlled by Hamas.
The exchange of fire came hours after US President Joe Biden had visited Israel and the occupied West Bank ahead of a summit in Saudi Arabia.
“Fighter jets struck a military site in the central Gaza Strip belonging to the Hamas terrorist organization,” the Israeli military said in a statement.
Photo: AFP
“The military site consists of an underground complex containing raw materials used for the manufacturing of rockets,” it added.
The strike “will significantly impede and undermine Hamas’ force-building capabilities,” it said, adding that Israel was responding to “attacks from the Gaza Strip on Israeli territory.”
Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem denounced the strikes, which the official Palestinian news agency WAFA said caused no injuries.
WAFA said Israeli missiles were fired at two locations, one “near a tourist resort” where nearby houses were severely damaged.
Balls of fire lit up the night sky over Gaza City after the strikes, which at one location left a hole in the earth beneath dislodged paving stones outside a low-rise building.
A man later swept up shattered glass in front of what appeared to be an office.
In further retaliation for the Gaza rocket fire, Israel on Saturday said it was suspending a decision to increase the number of permits granted for Gaza residents to work in the Jewish state.
The quota was raised before Biden’s visit by 1,500 permits, allowing 15,500 people from the Palestinian enclave to commute to Israel for work.
Hamas “carries responsibility for all activities directed against Israel in and from the Gaza Strip, and it will bear the consequences,” said the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, the Israeli Ministry of Defense’s body responsible for civil affairs in the Palestinian territories.
There had been two separate launches toward Israel on Friday night, each of two rockets, the military said.
Warning sirens had sounded in the city of Ashkelon and elsewhere in Israel’s south.
Israel said one of the rockets had been intercepted while the other three fell on empty land.
Impoverished Gaza, home to 2.3 million people, has been under Israeli blockade since 2007 when Iran-backed Hamas seized power from the secular Fatah movement of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
Before flying to Saudi Arabia on Friday, Biden visited the West Bank, where he reiterated his administration’s commitment to a two-state solution to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
There “must be a political horizon that the Palestinian people can actually see,” Biden said.
“I know that the goal of the two states seems so far away,” he said in Bethlehem, standing alongside his Palestinian counterpart.
Abbas said “recognizing the state of Palestine” was the key to peace.
With Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations moribund since 2014, the US delegation was focused on economic measures.
Biden announced an additional US$200 million for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees.
Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, had cut funding to the agency.
During a visit to a hospital in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem earlier that day, Biden pledged a US$100 million aid package for medical institutions in the area.
He also announced plans to roll out infrastructure for 4G Internet across Gaza and the West Bank by the end of next year.
Israel occupied the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in the 1967 Six-Day War.
It withdrew from Gaza in 2005, but has maintained a blockade of the coastal territory since the Hamas takeover.
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