Israeli jets carried out airstrikes in the Gaza Strip overnight Saturday-Sunday in response to rocket fire from the restive Palestinian enclave, the army said.
The raids in central Gaza targeted Hamas installations, according to the Israel Defense Forces. The IDF said the strikes undermined the terror organization’s military capabilities and said Israeli forces remained “on high alert for various scenarios,” without elaborating.
There were no immediate reports of damage or injuries in the retaliatory strikes.
Palestinian terrorists fired at least two rockets at southern Israel on Saturday night, apparently hitting open fields and causing no injuries, despite recent reports from both sides of the border of a ceasefire agreement, the military said.
The rockets appeared to strike outside the community of Kibbutz Kissufim, just east of the Gaza border, in the Eshkol region. Residents of the area reported hearing the sound of an explosion.
Security forces began searching the area for the impact sites, an Eshkol spokesperson said.
The army later announced that it had cancelled the revocation of some 500 permits allowing businessmen out of Gaza, an increase on the fishing zone, and an agreement to allow cement to be imported into the Strip.
The retaliatory sanctions that Israel put in place against Palestinians in the Strip were to be eased in exchange for the cessation of attacks, an Israeli defense official told reporters on Thursday.
The official had said that Hamas “sent messages to Israel that they’d decided unilaterally to stop launching balloons and rocket fire at Israel.”
Saturday’s attack came less than an hour after Defense Minister Naftali Bennett boasted in an interview on Channel 12 news that rocket fire from the Gaza Strip had decreased dramatically under his four-month tenure as defense minister, though it was not immediately clear how he reached this claim.
“From the three months before to the three months after I entered [the position of defense minister], the number of rockets dropped by 80 percent, and the riots on the border stopped completely,” Bennett said.
It was unclear how Bennett calculated this 80 percent drop, as just his first two days as defense minister saw a massive battle with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror group in Gaza in which hundreds of rockets were fired at Israel, compared to the 13 rockets and mortar shells fired at Israel in the three months prior to his entering the position, according to statistics from the Shin Bet security service.
The defense minister also made a somewhat dubious claim about the Israel Defense Forces’ response to the launching of balloon-borne explosive devices from the Gaza Strip into Israel.
“We are blowing up Hamas bases because of balloon launches, something we never did before,” Bennett said. The IDF did, in fact, conduct airstrikes on Hamas positions in response to these airborne explosives attacks multiple times over the years under previous defense ministers.
Saturday’s rocket fire came amid reports of an emerging ceasefire between Israel and terror groups in the Strip, following weeks of tensions and low-level clashes around the border, with regular rocket attacks and the daily launching of balloon-borne explosive devices into the country’s south.
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