Israel, Palestinians exchange heavy fire after raid in Gaza
JERUSALEM — Palestinian militants in Gaza mounted an intense and sustained rocket and mortar attack across much of southern Israel on Monday in retaliation for the killing of seven fighters by Israeli forces in a covert operation in Gaza the night before.
Israeli aircraft and tanks struck back repeatedly, hitting military targets in Gaza but also leveling a television station and attacking the homes of several militants, in the territory’s heaviest fighting since a war with Israel in 2014.
The fighting threatened to scuttle months of multilateral talks aimed at calming the Israel-Gaza border, where protests since March have been met with a lethal Israeli response, killing some 170 unarmed Palestinians and wounding thousands more. The talks had already produced concrete steps to ease tensions in Gaza, including increased electrical power and the influx of millions of dollars in aid.
More than 300 rockets and mortar shells were fired into Israel on Monday, scores of them intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome defense system, the Israeli military said. By nightfall, the military said its fighter jets, attack helicopters and tanks had struck more than 70 military targets in Gaza belonging to the militant groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
The authorities in Gaza said three Palestinians had been killed in the Israeli airstrikes and three others were wounded. More than a dozen Israelis were reported wounded in the rocket and mortar attacks, including a soldier, 19, who was seriously injured when a bus was struck near Kfar Aza, northeast of Gaza, by an anti-tank missile.
The Israeli military ordered all residents in the south, including in the cities of Ashdod and Beersheba, to remain in bomb shelters. There were reports homes had been struck and residents injured in Netivot and Sderot, Israeli towns near northern Gaza. Air-raid sirens were heard as far away as Hebron and the Dead Sea area.
On Monday night, both sides were escalating the conflict.
Just before 9 p.m., armed factions in Gaza said they were ratcheting up their rocket attacks, and sirens began sounding every few minutes near the Gaza perimeter. A direct hit was reported on a building in Ashkelon, Israel.
In Gaza City, employees of the Hamas television station Al Aqsa received a telephoned warning to evacuate its offices there on Monday night. The building was soon leveled by multiple missile blasts that were captured on video by onlookers.
A Hamas spokesman, Fawzi Barhoum, called the station’s destruction an act of “barbaric aggression.”
The Israeli military said the station, which was “owned and operated” by Hamas, was a legitimate military target. “It contributes to Hamas’ military actions, including by providing operational messaging to militants, directing and explicitly calling for terror activities against Israel, and providing guidance on how to carry out such terror activities,” the military said in a statement.
Soon after, an Israeli airstrike demolished Al Aqsa’s radio station.
Maj. Gen. Kamil Abu Rukun, Israel’s coordinator of government activities in the Palestinian territories, warned Gaza residents that Hamas had “crossed a red line,” and said that “Israel will dial up its response.”
The United Nations envoy to the region, Nickolay Mladenov, who has sought a cease-fire between Israel and Gaza, wrote on Twitter that both sides needed to step “back from the brink” of war. “Rockets must stop, restraint must be shown by all!” he wrote.
The escalation came hours after Palestinians and Israelis buried combatants who were killed on Sunday night, after what Israeli news media described as an Israeli intelligence mission inside the Gaza Strip that went awry.
Six Hamas fighters, including a commander of forces in the Khan Younis area, and a member of the Popular Resistance Committees, another armed faction, were killed. An Israeli lieutenant colonel in the elite Maglan unit, a commando brigade, was also killed in the clash and was hailed as a national hero at his funeral on Monday.