Israeli jets struck two Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip overnight Tuesday, injuring at least three people, hours after a rocket fired from the Palestinian enclave hit an open area in southern Israel.
The Israeli military said in a statement that in response to the projectile attack in the Hof Ashkelon Regional Council earlier Tuesday, “IAF aircraft targeted two Hamas posts in the northern Gaza Strip.”
A Gaza security source told AFP that Israeli warplanes had struck two bases belonging to Hamas’ military wing, causing significant damage.
A medical official at the Shifa Hospital in Gaza City said three people were being treated for injuries, including a 26-year-old man who was in critical condition after being struck in the head with shrapnel.
Videos and photos, allegedly of the Israeli strikes, were circulating on social media.
Footage of the Israeli strikes that targeted several areas in #Gazapic.twitter.com/nRb3F2j8J1
— Muhammad Smiry (@MuhammadSmiry) August 8, 2017
Gaza: Palestinians fired a missile at the city of Ashkelon. Israeli Air Force attacked several Palestinians injured pic.twitter.com/pYObOedsQm— מוטי שטיגליץ Motish (@mmotish) August 8, 2017
I swear this place has been exploded more than 10 times!— Satar (@Satar_Gaza) August 8, 2017
On Tuesday evening, warning sirens blared in southern Israel as the rocket from the Gaza Strip was fired into the country. It struck an open area in the Hof Ashkelon Regional Council, the army said.
While no group immediately claimed Tuesday’s rocket fire, Israel holds Hamas responsible for all rockets emanating from the Strip.
Hamas, the terror group that rules Gaza, has largely refrained from firing rockets into Israel since it fought a devastating war with Israel in 2014. Launches have often been ascribed to radical Salafist groups.
North Korea and the United States traded escalating threats, US with President Donald Trump warning it would be met “with fire and fury like the world has never seen” and Pyongyang claiming Wednesday it was examining its plans for attacking Guam.
The comments follow reports that North Korea has mastered a crucial technology needed to strike the United States with a nuclear missile.
Despite regular North Korean threats against Guam, a US territory in the Pacific about 2,100 miles (3,400 kilometers) from the Korean Peninsula, it is extremely unlikely that Pyongyang would risk the assured annihilation of its revered leadership with a pre-emptive attack on US citizens.
Still, the competing threats and Trump’s use of North Korea-style rhetoric — Pyongyang has long vowed to reduce Seoul to a “sea of fire” — raise the already high animosity and heightens worries that a miscalculation might spark conflict between the nuclear-armed nations.
The North Korean army said in a statement distributed by the state-run news agency that it is studying a plan to create an “enveloping fire” in areas around Guam with medium- to long-range ballistic missiles. The statement described Andersen Air Force Base on Guam as a “beachhead” for a potential US invasion of North Korea it needed to neutralize. It was unlikely the North’s threat was a direct response to Trump’s comments to the camera at his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey.
Trump spoke hours after reports were published that indicate North Korea can now wed nuclear warheads with its missiles, including its longest-range missiles that may be able to hit the American mainland. The North has strived for decades to have the ability to strike the U.S. and its Asian allies, and the pace of its breakthroughs is having far-reaching consequences for stability in the Pacific and beyond.
The nuclear advances were detailed in an official Japanese assessment Tuesday and a later Washington Post story that cited US intelligence officials and a confidential Defense Intelligence Agency report. The US now assesses the North Korean arsenal at up to 60 nuclear weapons, more than double most assessments by independent experts, according to the Post’s reporting.
“North Korea had best not make any more threats to the United States,” said a stern-looking Trump, seated with his arms crossed and with his wife beside him. “They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”
“He has been very threatening beyond a normal state. And as I said they will be met with fire, fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before.”
The remarks appeared scripted, with Trump glancing at a paper in front of him. They evoked President Harry Truman’s announcement of the US atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945, in which he warned of “a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.”
But it wasn’t clear what Trump, who is prone to hyperbole and bombast in far less grave situations, meant by the threat. White House officials did not elaborate.
Pyongyang responded angrily to the UN Security Council’s adoption this weekend of new, tougher sanctions spearheaded by Washington. The sanctions followed intercontinental ballistic missile tests last month, the second of which was estimating as having a range that could reach more of the U.S. mainland. The newly revealed US intelligence assessment indicates those missiles can carry nuclear warheads.
Denouncing the UN sanctions through state media, the North warned: “We will make the US pay by a thousand-fold for all the heinous crimes it commits against the state and people of this country.”
For North Korea, having a nuclear-tipped missile that could strike America would be the ultimate guarantee against US invasion.
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