Israel ‘fighting on two fronts’
NETANYAHU: CONDEMNS LYNCHING BY BOTH SIDES Kids from both sides among dead in most intense hostilities in 7 years.
Israel faced an escalating conflict on two fronts yesterday, scrambling to quell riots between Arabs and Jews on its own streets after days of exchanging deadly fire with Palestinian militants in Gaza.
Despite diplomatic efforts to halt the violence, which US President Joe Biden said he hoped would end “sooner than later”, hundreds of rockets tore through the skies over the Gaza Strip.
Israel’s civil aviation authority said it had diverted all incoming passenger flights headed for Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport to Ramon airport in the south.
Air raid warnings went off across Israel, including in the country’s north for the first time in years – which the army later said was a “false alarm”.
Israel’s air force launched multiple strikes, targeting what it described as locations linked to the “counterintelligence infrastructure” of Hamas, the Islamist group that controls Gaza, as well as the house of Iyad Tayeb, one of the movement’s commanders.
In Gaza, 67 people have been killed – including 17 children – and nearly 400 wounded in days of near relentless Israeli air strikes.
On Wednesday, Hamas announced the death of its military chief in Gaza City, Bassem Issa, with the Israeli military saying it had killed three other senior figures as well. Israeli strikes also destroyed a tower block housing Palestinian TV channel Al-Aqsa, set up by Hamas.
Israel said Palestinian militants had launched around 1 600 rockets into its territory since Monday evening. Seven people have been killed, including one six-year-old after a rocket struck the family home in southern Israel, the United Hatzalah volunteer rescue service said. The past few days have seen the most intense hostilities in seven years between Israel and Gaza’s armed groups, triggered by weekend unrest at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque compound, which is sacred to both Muslims and Jews.
Coinciding with the aerial bombardments is surging violence between Arabs and Jews inside Israel. On Wednesday night, Israeli far-right groups took to the streets across the country, clashing with security forces and Arab Israelis.
Police said they had responded to violent incidents in multiple towns, confirming 374 arrests shortly past midnight. Israeli television aired footage of a far-right mob beating a man they considered an Arab until he lay unconscious on his back in a street.
“What has been happening these last few days in Israeli towns is unacceptable... Nothing justifies the lynching of Arabs by Jews and nothing justifies the lynching of Jews by Arabs,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, adding that Israel was fighting a battle “on two fronts”.