The authorities of the Strip raise the death toll to 12, including a five-year-old girl, and 80 injured
The anti-aircraft sirens sounded again this Friday with force in the Gaza Strip and several towns in southern Israel. The Hebrew army began a bombing operation against targets of the Islamic Jihad terrorist organization in the territory in the early afternoon. The attack, called ‘Operation Dawn’, ended the life of a commander of the group identified as Tayseer al Jabari, a military commander in the northern part of the Strip.
The bombardment came after four days of preventive blockade of the Strip by Israel, which moved dozens of tanks to the border between the two territories and mobilized 25,000 soldiers in the reserve. The Executive feared possible reprisals from Islamic Jihad after Monday arrested one of the leaders, Basam Saadi, and his son-in-law Ashraf al Jada in the West Bank. A Palestinian teenager was also killed in the operation. When the Israeli armed forces killed Baha Abu al Bata, Al Jabari’s predecessor, in an airstrike in 2019, there were two days of clashes between the Israeli Army and Islamic Jihad that left at least 34 members of the terrorist group dead. and 111 wounded.
However, on this occasion the Hebrew Army decided to carry out the attack before the terrorist organization took any action. In addition to Al Jabari, twelve other people died in the bombing – including a five-year-old girl – and 80 were injured, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. Israeli forces, however, claim to have killed 15 jihadist fighters.
The angry reaction of Islamic Jihad, which promised to “open the gates of hell”, was not long in coming. Its militiamen from the Al Quds Brigades, the military branch, fired “more than a hundred rockets” from the Strip towards Israeli territory, although the ‘Iron Dome’ anti-aircraft protection system intercepted the majority, as explained by the Israeli armed forces themselves in a release.
The images of the bombings showed buildings with the facade completely destroyed. Israeli bombardments hit three dozen targets of the group, which is on the list of terrorist organizations of the United States and the European Union. It maintains close ties with Iran and is very close to Hamas, the organization that governs the day-to-day in the Strip, which, however, has remained on the sidelines of the latest violent escalation.
Battles “without respite”
During the early morning, Israeli forces have also arrested 19 members of Islamic Jihad in the West Bank. The confrontation threatens to fester. The terrorist group excludes a ceasefire and says that it was “concentrated on the ground.” The organization accuses Israel of having “triggered a war.” “The Zionist enemy initiated this aggression and must prepare for us to fight relentlessly,” the secretary general of Islamic Jihad told Lebanese Al-Mayadeen television from Tehran.
Rockets fired by Al Quds militiamen from the Gaza Strip in the early hours of this Saturday, in response to the Israeli bombardment /
For their part, the Prime Minister, Yair Lapid, and the Minister of Defense, Benny Gantz, assured that “they will not allow terrorist groups to dictate the agenda in Israeli towns and borders”, as they pointed out in a joint statement in the They stressed that the government will not let these organizations “threaten Israeli citizens.” “Anyone looking to harm Israel should know that we will get them. The security forces will act against the Islamic Jihad terrorists, they will eliminate the threat to the citizens of Israel,” Lapid said.
This latest escalation of tension is the worst confrontation between Israel and the armed organizations in Gaza since the eleven-day war in May 2021, which left 260 dead on the Palestinian side, including combatants, and 14 dead in Israel, including a soldier. .
Egypt, a historical mediator between Israel and the armed groups in Gaza, seeks to intervene in the conflict and could receive a delegation from Islamic Jihad this Saturday, Egyptian authorities told AFP.
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