Israel and Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip launched renewed rocket salvos against each other on Saturday, as fighting entered a fifth day despite Egyptian efforts to mediate a truce.
The Israeli military said on Saturday that since the confrontation began it had bombed 325 sites in the blockaded coastal enclave, while militants had fired 1,099 rockets and mortars at Israel, in the worst round of violence for almost a year.
Egyptian officials have been trying to negotiate a ceasefire since Wednesday, but the talks faltered after Israel rejected a demand from Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the militant group responsible for the rocket fire, that it stop targeted killings of the its leadership.
“As long as the assassinations and the bombing of apartments and safe houses continue, the Palestinian resistance will continue to launch its rockets,” Islamic Jihad’s armed wing said on Saturday.
“The resistance has prepared itself for months of confrontation.”
Hamas, the more powerful militant group that controls Gaza and which fought an 11-day war with Israel in 2021, has stayed out of the conflict.
The fighting caps a year of mounting Israeli-Palestinian tensions, with Israeli forces conducting near-nightly raids in the occupied West Bank in the wake of attacks by Palestinians on Israelis, and Israel and militants in Gaza periodically exchanging rocket fire.
The latest round of violence erupted on Tuesday when Israel killed 15 people, including eight women and children, in air strikes targeting three senior members of Islamic Jihad that it said had been involved in rocket fire from the strip a week earlier.
In the days since, a total of 33 people, including 9 women and children, have been killed in the Gaza Strip, according to the local health ministry, and 147 people have been injured. Israel said it had killed at least six senior Islamic Jihad officials.
In Israel, one woman was killed on Thursday after a rocket hit an apartment block in the city of Rehovot. A further five people were wounded in the strike, according to Israeli paramedics.
The rocket salvos have forced people across the south of Israel into bomb shelters, as well as setting off warning sirens in the commercial hub of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, which militants targeted in a rare move on Friday.
The fighting has also aggravated the dire humanitarian conditions in Gaza, a 365 sq km enclave home to more than 2mn Palestinians whose economy has been devastated by a 16-year blockade by Israel and Egypt.
OCHA, the UN’s humanitarian affairs agency, warned on Friday that 417 people in the strip had been internally displaced during the fighting, mainly owing to the destruction of their homes.
It added that the power outages that plague the enclave had also worsened, reducing the electricity supply to fewer than 12 hours a day in many parts of Gaza.
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