Palestinian militants fire rockets at Israel after 10 people were killed in airstrikes in Gaza.

Nidal al-Mugrabi

GAZA (Reuters) – Palestinian militants in Gaza launched dozens of rockets into Israel on Friday in response to Israeli airstrikes that killed at least 10 people, including a senior commander of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement.

As night fell, Israeli officials said sirens were sounding in the central and southern regions, with footage from Israeli broadcasters showing some missiles hit by air defense systems. In Tel Aviv, Israel’s economic hub, eyewitnesses said they heard explosions but there were no reports of sirens.

Islamic Jihad, a militant group with a similar ideology to the ruling Islamist movement in Gaza, Hamas, said on Friday it had fired more than 100 rockets at Israeli cities, including Tel Aviv. The Israeli ambulance service said there were no reports of any deaths.

The attacks come a little over a year after an 11-day war between Israel and Hamas in May 2021 that killed at least 250 people in Gaza and killed 13 in Israel and devastated the economy of the besieged enclave.

Local health officials in Gaza previously said at least 10 people, including a five-year-old boy, were killed and 55 injured in Israeli airstrikes, after days of escalating tensions following the arrest of a militant leader. week.

An Israeli spokesperson said the attacks killed the Islamic Jihad commander, Tayseer al-Jaabari, and about 15 “terrorists”, but the military did not have a final death toll.

The attacks came after Israel arrested Bassam al-Saadi, the senior leader of the Islamic Jihad group, earlier this week during an operation in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin.

Israel then closed all Gaza crossings and some nearby roads, fearing that the group, which had a stronghold in Gaza, would further restrict Palestinian movement with retaliatory attacks.

“The aim of this operation is to eliminate a tangible threat to Israeli citizens and civilians living around the Gaza Strip,” Prime Minister Yair Lapid said in a statement.

(Reported by Nidal al Mughrabi, Henriette Chacar, James Mackenzie)