A large incendiary kite launched from Gaza landed on power lines near Kibbutz Sufa, sparking a quick operation Saturday by employees from the Israeli Electric Corporation to remove the device before a fire was started.
The kite caused a brief power cut at the kibbutz.
It was removed from the high-voltage wires by electric company workers using a crane.
In another community near the Gaza Strip, police sappers neutralized an incendiary balloon flown over from the Hamas-run Palestinian enclave that landed next to a dining room in an Israeli community in the Eshkol Region.
In response, the Israeli military on Saturday afternoon said it targeted a cell responsible for launching incendiary balloons in the northern Gaza Strip. Reports in Palestinian media said two people were injured in the Israeli strikes in El-Bureij.
There were also Palestinian reports of a second IDF strike elsewhere in the Gaza Strip.
Earlier, another incendiary device sparked a fire in the Nir Am nature reserve. The blaze was largely under control by Saturday afternoon, according to the Parks Authority.
Southern Israel has experienced hundreds of fires as a result of incendiary kites and balloons flown over the border from Gaza in recent months. Over 7,000 acres of land have been burned, causing millions of shekels in damages, according to Israeli officials.
The arson attacks Saturday came on the heels of clashes along the Gaza border on Friday that saw three Palestinians killed, according to the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza. Several thousand Gazans gathered in different locations along the border, setting tires ablaze and throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at Israeli security forces.
Several attempts were made to breach the security fence.
Israeli tanks struck two Hamas posts in the Gaza Strip Friday evening after a grenade was hurled at troops and amid intense violence during the mass riots. Authorities said nine fires broke out in southern Israel on Friday that were sparked by Gaza incendiary devices.
The violence that erupted over the weekend came after Hamas and Israel appeared to be honoring an informal cease-fire that ended two days of intense violence amid efforts by neighboring Egypt to negotiate between the two sides.
Hamas’s Al Aqsa TV channel reported late Thursday that the Egyptian-brokered deal took hold “on the basis of mutual calm.” It was at least the third such truce in recent weeks.
But Hadashot TV news reported on Friday that Israel denied making any ceasefire agreement with Hamas to end intense the Gaza rocket fire into Israel, which had prompted IDF response attacks Wednesday and Thursday.
A senior Israeli diplomatic official insisted to Hadashot that Hamas’s announcement that Jerusalem had agreed to a truce was a lie. A senior defense official backed up the claim, and added that the army did not see the confrontation as over.
The implication was that Israel had ceased its reprisal attacks in the Strip because Hamas had halted rocket attacks on Israeli communities, but did not see itself obligated to a truce.
Leaders of Israeli cities and towns near the Gaza border on Friday criticized the government over the apparent ceasefire with Hamas and called for a long-term solution.
Satellite pictures released on Saturday by an Israeli intelligence site appeared to show the aftermath of an airstrike on an Iranian-run missile production facility in Syria last month, an operation which has been attributed to Israel.
The facility, in Masyaf in northwestern Syria’s Hama province, was previously allegedly used to produce and store chemical weapons. It was run by Dr. Aziz Asbar, a top Syrian chemical weapons and rocket scientist, who was killed earlier this month when his car exploded in Masyaf. A senior official from a Middle East intelligence agency has pointed the finger at Israel’s Mossad for the alleged assassination, according to a New York Times report this week.
According to that report, Israel believed that Asbar was leading a classified weapons development program called Sector 4 at the Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Center, and was busy re-building an underground weapons factory to replace the one said destroyed by Israel last year.
The satellite pictures were released Saturday by the Israeli website Intelli Times, and showed the facility both two days before the alleged attack on July 22 and in its aftermath. The facility was in charge of the production of the Syrian versions of Iran’s Fateh 110 surface-to-surface missiles, which have a range of approximately 200 km, according to the report.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at the time that the strike targeted a “workshop supervised by Iranians where surface-to-surface missiles are made.”
“Iranian forces and forces from Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement are deployed in that sector,” Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.
Israel did not comment on its alleged involvement in the July airstrike on the facility, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement following the raid that Israel “will not stop taking action in Syria against Iran’s attempts to establish a military presence there.”
According to Intelli Times, the facility was one of two centers overseen by Asbar in the area, the second being a local site of the Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Center, better known by its French acronym CERS.
Western officials have long associated CERS with the manufacture of chemical arms. According to the United States, sarin gas was being developed at that center, a charge denied by the Syrian authorities.
In September 2017, Syria accused Israel of carrying out a strike on the CERS facility that left two dead. The bombing came after opposition sources claimed that Iranian and Syrian specialists were working there to develop chemical weapons capability for missiles. There was another bombing at the site in December 2017.
Since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011, Israel has sought to avoid direct involvement in the conflict, but has acknowledged carrying out dozens of airstrikes there to stop deliveries of advanced weaponry to its Lebanese enemy Hezbollah.
It has also pledged to prevent Iran from entrenching itself militarily in Syria; a series of recent strikes that have killed Iranians in Syria have been attributed to Israel.
Suspected Israeli airstrikes over the years have hit Syrian army positions near Damascus and in the central provinces of Homs and Hama. Last month, Israel was said to have carried out an airstrike on the T-4 military base near Homs, thought to be used by IRGC fighters.
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