Gaza City: Israel carried out strikes early Tuesday in the Gaza Strip after a rocket was fired from the Palestinian enclave into Israel, witnesses and the Israeli military said. Israeli aircraft hit the southern Gaza Strip, while the armed wing of Hamas announced that it fired on Israeli planes, witnesses said.
‘Congratulations to the men of the resistance who confronted the fighter jets with our anti-aircraft defence’, Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem said in a statement, claiming the Israeli raid hit ’empty sites’. Witnesses and security sources in the Gaza Strip reported no injuries from the raid, which come shortly after Israel’s “Iron Dome” air defence system intercepted a rocket fire from Gaza into Israeli territory. ‘In response to this attack, IDF fighter jets struck a Hamas terrorist organisation weapons manufacturing site in the Gaza Strip’, the Israeli army said.
Tension between Israel and the Palestinians has risen over the past week, after six Palestinian militants escaped from a maximum security Israeli jail on Monday. Israeli forces have since captured four of the inmates. The rocket attack and retaliatory air raid come after a weekend of Israeli-Palestinian violence in and around Jerusalem’s flashpoint Al-Aqsa Mosque compound that wounded more than 170 people, mostly Palestinian demonstrators.
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