At least three Palestinian police officers were killed and three others were wounded as two explosions hit police checkpoints near Gaza City late Tuesday night, according to authorities in the Hamas-run enclave.
The Israel Defense Forces denied involvement in the blasts, saying it was “unaware of any strikes” in Gaza.
Gaza’s Hamas-run interior ministry said the first explosion occurred next to a police checkpoint south of Gaza City.
“Two members of the police were martyred as a result of an explosion that took place near a police checkpoint at the Dahdouh intersection,” Hamas-run Interior Ministry spokesman Iyad al-Bozm said.
The Strip’s Hamas-run health ministry said two people were killed and a third man suffered serious injuries in the explosion. The ministry initially blamed the blast on Israel, but later retracted the claim.
The third man later died of his injuries.
The dead were identified as Salameh al-Nadim, 32, Wael Khalifa, 45, and Alaa al-Gharbali, 32, all traffic policemen.
Minutes later another blast hit a second police checkpoint west of Gaza City, wounding three people, the Interior Ministry spokesman said.
Their condition was not immediately clear.
“The security forces, including the police, are carrying out investigations at both places where explosions occurred,” he said.
Following the blasts Hamas put all its forces on alert.
“Mobilization of all police and security forces has been declared to follow-up on security developments in the aftermath of the two explosions,” said al-Bozm.
Palestinian terrorists fired four mortar shells at Israel from the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, with one of them landing inside Israeli territory, the army said.
In response, an Israeli aircraft bombed a Hamas observation post east of Juhor ad-Dik in the central Gaza Strip, according to the Israel Defense Forces.
No injuries were reported on either side.
The military said one of the shells cleared the border and struck an open field in Israeli territory, causing no damage. Three appeared to have landed inside Gaza.
The shell that hit Israel triggered rocket alert sirens in the area where the mortar landed, the army said.
The volley came amid a flurry of rocket attacks and mutual threats between Israel and terror groups in the Gaza Strip. Israel has accused the Iran-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad of being behind the recent violence from the enclave.
Egypt has warned Hamas it will stop mediating truce negotiations with Israel if the Palestinian terror group does not put a lid on rocket fire from the Gaza Strip, the Al-Arabiya news site reported Tuesday.
Egypt also cautioned the Gaza rulers against entanglement in an armed conflict with Israel on behalf of Iran and its proxy Hezbollah, amid soaring tensions with the Jewish state, according to the report.
Citing Egyptian sources, the Saudi TV network said Cairo would adopt new measures to ease pressure on Gaza and work to achieve calm in order to facilitate the entry of further aid to the Palestinian enclave if the violence is curbed.
The sources told Al-Arabiya that Egypt was also telling Israel to adhere to its demands on Gaza while it attempts to broker a long-term ceasefire with the de facto rulers of the Strip.
The report came as a Hamas delegation was in Cairo to hold talks with Egyptian officials over recent rocket fire from Gaza and attempts by armed fighters to infiltrate into Israel.
The target of a drone attack on a Hezbollah facility in Beirut early Sunday that has been attributed to Israel was an expensive and rare industrial mixing machine used in the creation of solid fuel, and the raid set back the terror group’s plans to develop long-range precision missiles by at least a year, according to Hebrew media reports late Tuesday.
In the predawn hours of Sunday morning, two copter-style drones flew into the Dahiyeh neighborhood of Beirut. One crashed and was recovered by Hezbollah, while the other exploded while still in the air, causing damage and sparking a fire.
Hezbollah and the Lebanese government have blamed Israel for the drone strike. Israeli officials have refused to comment on the matter, and many analysts have suggested the drones were Iranian, not Israeli.
While Israel has been facing off against Hezbollah and its patron Iran, following the 2006 Second Lebanon War, the Israeli military has largely refrained from carrying out large strikes against the terror group inside Lebanon, instead, according to foreign reports, focusing the fighting in Syria and more recently Iraq.
Though Israel has been accused of conducting limited airstrikes against Hezbollah deep in Lebanon in the 13 years since the war, this week’s drone attack in the heart of Beirut would mark a shift to a more aggressive defense policy for the Jewish state.
According to Lebanese media Tuesday, the country’s military believes that the unmanned aerial vehicles were launched from within eight kilometers of the site of the explosion, indicating that they were either launched within Lebanon or came in from the sea.
However, on Tuesday afternoon, the British Times newspaper reported that the targets of the strike were two crates that held materials for a Hezbollah program to turn its stock of simple rockets into precision-guided missiles — a project that is of deep concern to Israel as it would significantly increase the threat posed by these projectiles.
Last September, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the United Nations General Assembly in a speech that Israel knew of this Hezbollah plot and even provided the geographic coordinates for the facilities where the missiles were allegedly being produced.
This Hezbollah program is focused on two main goals: locally manufacturing long-range precise missiles and upgrading its current stock of simple rockets into precision-guided ones.
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