The Israeli military announced early Friday that it had carried out airstrikes in the Gaza Strip following rocket fire from the Palestinian enclave over southern Israel.
“Fighter jets and helicopters hit an ammunition factory, a smuggling tunnel and a military post” of Hamas, the armed Islamist movement in power in the Gaza Strip, the IDF said in a brief statement. , having carried out this operation in retaliation for a rocket fire on Thursday evening.
The projectile launched from Gaza, a thin strip of land where fighters of the Islamic Jihad, the second local armed Islamist movement, are also active, landed in an uninhabited area and caused no casualties or damage, according to a council spokesperson. region of Sha’ar HaNegev, sector of southern Israel bordering the Palestinian enclave.
Residents of the town of Sderot – located at the northern exit of the Gaza Strip – took cover, the Israeli army said.
The Gaza Strip, a Palestinian enclave of two million inhabitants, has been controlled by Hamas since 2007 and since then subjected to an Israeli blockade, a prelude to three wars between Hamas and Israel (2008, 2012, 2014).
Since then, rocket and incendiary balloon fire from Gaza and Israeli retaliatory strikes against Hamas or Islamic Jihad have taken place sporadically.
The last rocket fire from Gaza into Israel was on March 23, the night of the Israeli legislative elections. The rocket fell in a vacant lot in the south of the country a few kilometers from a city visited by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, without however causing any casualties.