JERUSALEM: The Israeli military said yesterday it had conducted airstrikes against targets in the Gaza Strip following a rocket attack from the Palestinian enclave, in the second such exchange in as many days. The strikes hit what the military described as “terror targets” operated by Gaza’s Islamist ruling party Hamas. They included a “training facility, an anti-aircraft missile launcher post, a concrete production plant & terror tunnel infrastructure”.
Witnesses and security sources said the strikes hit two militant “training sites” in southern Gaza and another target in central Gaza. A Hamas spokesman said that despite the Israeli action, “Gaza still fights and doesn’t break.”
The strikes came hours after militants in the Gaza Strip fired a rocket into southern Israel. An Israeli army spokesperson said the rocket hit open ground and caused no casualties or damage. It was the second such exchange in recent days. Late Thursday, Palestinian militants fired a rocket at southern Israel, prompting the army to launch retaliatory air strikes on Gaza that caused no casualties.
Israel imposed a blockade of Gaza’s sea and land borders after Hamas seized control in 2007. The two sides have since fought three wars. A fragile truce has endured in recent years despite occasional flareups, with Palestinians firing rockets at Israel and the Jewish state responding with airstrikes on the coastal enclave. Arch-foes Israel and Iran have long fought an undeclared shadow war across the Middle East, landing blows in Lebanon, Syria and inside the Islamic republic itself. More recently, the battle has moved to the high seas, with a series of mysterious attacks and sabotage incidents mainly in the Red and Arabian Seas.
Analysts now fear the tit-for-tat attacks could escalate, warning that the protagonists are “playing with fire”. Israel has vowed to stop Iran, whose leaders have threatened to “wipe it off the map”, from acquiring a nuclear bomb-a goal Tehran denies pursuing. The Islamic republic meanwhile has provided arms, training and money to allied militias in a regional “axis of resistance” against the Jewish state and its ally the United States. In the latest attack Iran blamed on Israel, a blast hit Iran’s enrichment facility in Natanz Sunday, complicating diplomatic efforts to salvage a tattered 2015 deal on Tehran’s nuclear program.
Then on Tuesday, Israeli-operated ship the Hyperion Ray was attacked near the Emirati port of Fujairah, the latest in a string of off-shore attacks.
Spy missions, assassinations
Israel has often fought Tehran’s allies, including Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Hamas in the Palestinian enclave of Gaza, and pro-Iran fighters in Syria. The Jewish state has also launched cyberattacks and spy missions, such as a 2018 Mossad operation that netted a treasure trove of Iranian nuclear documents from a Tehran warehouse. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in recent years relished having a White House ally in Donald Trump, who waged a hardline “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran.
Trump in 2018 ripped up the 2015 agreement that had granted Iran sanctions relief in return for limits on its nuclear activities, a deal Israel always rejected as inadequate. Under Trump, the US also killed revered Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in a Baghdad drone strike early last year, a move that brought Tehran and Washington to the brink of war. — AFP
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