Deadly night of violence flares as 1,000 rockets fired towards Israel

Sr Hamas commander killed as Israel strikes back Gaza, tensions intensify

Israel unleashed a relentless aerial attack on the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip after a massive rocket barrage over the country’s commercial heartland, as the death toll climbed and the sides edged closer to all-out war.

Forty-three people have been reported killed in Gaza and six in Israel since the most serious fighting since 2014 exploded on Monday night. More than 1,000 rockets have been fired from the Palestinian enclave, and Israel has carried out about 500 raids, the Israeli military said on Wednesday. Three Palestinians have died in confrontations with Israeli security forces in the West Bank.

“Hamas will receive blows here that it did not expect,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday after the first fatalities on the Israeli side. Israel, which had initially targeted military facilities in Gaza, has widened its net to assassinate several key Hamas intelligence figures and military commanders.

The escalation set off a flurry of diplomatic efforts to defuse the violence involving Egypt, the U.S. and United Nations. The UN Security Council said it would hold a second emergency session Wednesday to address the crisis. U.S. President Joe Biden directed National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Secretary of State Antony Blinken to reach out to their Israeli counterparts.

The hostilities spilled over from weeks of clashes between Israeli security forces and Palestinians in contested Jerusalem.

The holy city, home to Jewish, Muslim and Christian shrines, lies at the heart of the Israeli-palestinian conflict, and competing claims to it have underpinned the latest confrontation. Tensions have also been stoked by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s cancellation of Palestinian elections, over Hamas’s objections.

The violence has set off a wave of protests by Israeli Arabs in support of the Palestinians, and unprecedented clashes with Jews and destruction of property in several cities.

A state of emergency was declared on Tuesday in the central city of Lod, where Jews and Arabs live in a mixed community, after Arab assailants set synagogues, shops and cars on fire following the killing of an Arab resident by a Jewish man amid rioting a day earlier.

Israel strikes back

Israel said it killed 16 members of the Hamas military wing in a Gaza air strike on Wednesday and Palestinian militants rained rockets into Israel as global concern mounted over their most intense hostilities in years.

Israel's Shin Bet security service said the brigade commander for Gaza City was among senior members of the Islamist militant group Hamas who had been killed.

“This is just the beginning. We'll hit them like they've never dreamed possible," Netanyahu said in a statement.