Rockets Pound Israel as Air Raids Kill Seven in Gaza
Israeli air raids killed seven Islamic Jihad militants in the Gaza Strip on Saturday, prompting a massive barrage of retaliatory rocket fire, officials said.
Adham Abu Selmiya, spokesman for Gaza's emergency services, said five members of the al-Quds Brigades, Islamic Jihad's armed wing, were killed and three critically wounded in a first Israeli attack.
As tit-for-tat fighting continued into the night, Israeli aircraft struck two more targets in Gaza, witnesses and Palestinian officials said, killing two militants and wounding two allegedly preparing to fire a missile.
A strike east of Gaza City caused no casualties.
Israeli police said they were raising their national alert level to its second-highest.
The Israeli military could not immediately confirm the latest reported strikes but said of the earlier raid that the air force fired on a "group of terrorists preparing to fire long-range rockets" and that the attack had "prevented the attempted firing."
It said the men had also been responsible for firing a Grad rocket into Israel on Wednesday that hit near the city of Ashdod, 35 kilometers from the Gaza border.
The al-Quds Brigades confirmed that five members, including a commander named as Ahmed al-Sheikh Khalil, were killed in the first strike, on a training camp near the southern city of Rafah.
The second fatal raid was also in Rafah, witnesses said.
The strikes were the bloodiest since a tacit ceasefire was agreed between Gaza Palestinian militants and Israel in late August.
Reprisal attacks began after sunset, and police said that by mid-evening 21 rockets had been fired from Gaza into southern Israel.
One slammed into a community center and another into a block of flats, setting parked cars and gas canisters alight.
Rockets hit the city of Ashdod, the nearby town of Gan Yavneh and the city of Ashkelon, to the south, police said.
Spokeswoman Luba Samri told Agence France Presse that two people were moderately wounded and two others slightly injured.
Other rockets hit open ground elsewhere in southern Israel and one was fired "in the general direction" of the city of Beersheeva, in the Negev desert, but appeared to have stuck open ground, police said.
Israeli rescue services said a number of mortar rounds also hit areas near the frontier.
A statement from the al-Quds Brigades claimed responsibility for the fire and posted a video on its website it said showed the launching of five of the rockets.
Spokesman Abu Ahmed accused Israel of carrying out the raid in order to heighten tensions so it could renege on freeing 550 Palestinian prisoners agreed as part of a prisoner-swap deal with Gaza rulers Hamas for the liberation of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.
Israel released 477 prisoners in exchange for Shalit earlier this month and is due to free the other 550 within two months.
A spokesman for Hamas's Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades said other militant groups were mulling their response.
"The occupation is completely responsible for the crime in Rafah and all of the resistance factions cannot leave the shedding of our martyrs' blood unanswered," spokesman Abu Obeida said. "We shall discuss the answer to this crime."
The Israeli air force carried out three raids on the Gaza Strip Thursday in retaliation for that attack, witnesses said.
Those raids targeted areas east and west of Khan Yunis in the south of the Strip, and a base of the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades was hit, they said.
An Israeli army spokesman said of those strikes that aircraft had "attacked three terrorist sites in the Gaza Strip as well as an arms factory in the south of the territory."
Source: Agence France Presse
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