The Israeli military struck targets in the Gaza Strip while Palestinian militants fired barrages of rockets rockets into southern Israel early Friday, with the region edging closer toward war following two days of unrest at Jerusalem’s most sensitive holy site and a rare rocket attack from neighbouring Lebanon.
The fighting comes during a delicate time — when Jews are celebrating the Passover holiday and Muslims are marking the Ramadan holy month. Similar tensions spilled over into an 11-day war between Israel and Gaza’s Hamas rulers in 2021.
The current round of violence began Wednesday after Israeli police twice raided the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City. That led Thursday to rocket fire from Gaza and, in a significant escalation, an unusual barrage of nearly three dozen rockets from Lebanon into northern Israel.
As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convened his Security Cabinet late Thursday, the military struck what it said were four sites in Gaza belonging to Hamas.
Following the nearly three-hour meeting, Netanyahu’s office put out a short statement saying a series of decisions had been made.
“Israel’s response, tonight and beyond, will extract a heavy price from our enemies,” Netanyahu said in the statement. It did not elaborate.
But almost immediately, Palestinian militants in Gaza began firing rockets into southern Israel, setting off air raid sirens across the region. Loud explosions could be heard in Gaza from the Israeli strikes, as outgoing rockets whooshed into the skies toward Israel.
The airstrikes came after militants in Lebanon fired some 34 rockets into Israel, forcing people across Israel’s northern frontier into bomb shelters and wounding at least two people.
The Israeli military said the rocket fire on its northern and southern fronts was carried out by Palestinian militants in connection to this week’s violence at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, where Israeli police stormed into the building with tear gas and stun grenades to confront Palestinians barricaded inside on two straight days. The violent scenes from the mosque ratcheted up tensions across the region.
There was no immediate Israeli action in Lebanon. The military said some 25 of the rockets were intercepted. But two people were wounded and property was damaged in several communities in northern Israel. The rare attack from Lebanon raised fears of a wider conflagration as Israel’s bitter enemy, the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah, holds sway over much of southern Lebanon.
In a briefing with reporters, Lt Col Richard Hecht, an Israeli military spokesman, said the army drew a clear connection between the Lebanese rocket fire and the recent unrest in Jerusalem. “It’s a Palestinian-oriented event,” he said, adding that either the Hamas or Islamic Jihad militant groups, which are based in Gaza but also operate in Lebanon, could be involved. But he said the army believed that Hezbollah and the Lebanese government were aware of what happened and also held responsibility.