Hamas blames Israel for deadly blast

The Izzadin Kassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing, said on Sunday it holds Israel responsible for an explosion that killed several of its members in the Gaza Strip Saturday evening and vowed to exact revenge.

The explosion in the Zuweyida neighborhood in central Gaza killed six Palestinians, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry in the coastal enclave. The Kassam Brigades later identified the victims as its members.

“We hold the criminal Zionist enemy directly responsible for this crime,” the group said in a statement. “The Zionist enemy will pay a high price.

We say that, with God’s permission, the settling of accounts is inevitably coming.”

The statement contended that the Kassam Brigades members died after they succeeded in thwarting “a major Israeli spying plot.”

It further asserted that Israel planted a “spying system” in Gaza armed with an automatic explosion device “to carry out revenge against the Palestinian people and its resistance”, suggesting “the spying system” had blown up and killed the Kassam members.

An IDF spokeswoman and a Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) spokesman declined to comment.

Hamas Politburo Chairman Ismail Haniyeh said the Kassam Brigades members who dies in the blast “saved hundreds of lives” and “preserved the resistance’s security depth.”