Tel Aviv: Israel launched a series of bombing raids in the central Gaza Strip in response to rocket attacks from Gazan terrorists, and said that the raids will lead to “significant harm to Hamas efforts” in building up its arms, The Times of Israel reported on Friday.
The Israel Defence Force (IDF) said that they targeted Bottom of Form, an underground facility where rockets are manufactured in the Maghazi refugee camp in central Gaza.
“The attack will lead to significant harm to Hamas’ efforts to build up its arms,” the IDF said in a statement, according to The Times of Israel.
Footage published on social media showed several large explosions from the airstrikes in Gaza.
Nine Palestinians, including several members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) cell, other gunmen, and at least one uninvolved civilian, were killed, and another 20 were wounded in the clashes, reported The Times of Israel..
Israel says it holds Hamas responsible for all violence emanating from the Gaza Strip and generally responds to rocket fire with airstrikes against the group regardless of who launched the attack.
According to Israeli officials, the IDF had foiled a “ticking time bomb” in Jenin on Thursday after receiving “accurate intelligence” from the Shin Bet security agency about the PIJ cell’s hideout apartment in the camp, reported The Times of Israel.
As tit-for-tat continues, Israel and Gazan terrorists continued launching their rockets against each other. After Israel launched rockets, on Friday morning Ghaza launched several rockets toward southern Israel.
At least three rockets were fired from Gaza at around 3:30 am Friday, Israeli jets bombed sites said to belong to the Hamas terror group in retaliation for a rocket attack hours earlier.
One of the rockets was intercepted by the Iron Dome anti-missile system, another landed in an open field and a third fell short of the border, the army said, after alarms sounded in the towns of Nir Oz, Ein Habesor and Magen.
Separately on Thursday afternoon, a Palestinian man was killed in clashes with Israeli troops in the town of a-Ram, north of Jerusalem, the PA Health Ministry said.
Tensions have recently soared in the West Bank as the Israel Defence Force presses on with an anti-terror offensive mostly focused on the northern West Bank to deal with a series of attacks that have left 31 people in Israel dead in 2022, as per the The Times of Israel report.