The Israeli army announced on Saturday that it was preparing for “a week” of incursions into the Gaza Strip, where exchanges of fire with Islamic Jihad have already killed more than a dozen Palestinians.
For the first time since this new outbreak of violence that began on Friday, warning sirens sounded in the Israeli metropolis of Tel Aviv at the end of the afternoon. Until now, they had sounded in towns near Gaza, from where the Islamic Jihad fired rockets in response to attacks by the Israeli army.
The armed wing of the Palestinian group, the Al-Quds Brigades, confirmed in a brief statement that it had fired “a heavy barrage of rockets” towards the Israeli cities of Tel Aviv, Ashkelon, Ashdod and Sderot.
The Israeli army prepares for “a week-long operation”
“The battle is only at its beginning,” Mohammed Al-Hindi, an official with the organization, said in a press release. And this after Egyptian sources indicated, however, that Cairo, a historical intermediary between Israel and the armed groups in Gaza, was trying to establish mediation.
An Israeli military spokesman assured him that the army was preparing “for a week-long operation” and was “not currently conducting ceasefire negotiations.” Gaza authorities reported 15 dead, including a five-year-old girl, and 125 wounded in the Israeli bombardment.
On the Israeli side, two people were injured by shrapnel, according to the emergency services. Most of the rockets were intercepted by the missile shield, the army said, while a building was damaged in Sderot and a fire broke out in the same southern sector, according to local authorities.
power outages
For 24 hours, Israel has claimed to attack sites belonging to Islamic Jihad, of which 15 fighters have been killed according to the Israeli military. Among them, a commander in chief of the group, Tayssir Al-Jabari.
This new escalation, the worst between the two enemies since a blitzkrieg last year, has already deprived the small tongue of land wedged between Egypt, the Mediterranean and Israel and its 2.3 million inhabitants of its only power plant.
“It stopped (working) due to shortages” of fuel, the power company said on Saturday after the Jewish state, which has imposed a blockade on Gaza since 2007, sealed border crossings in recent days, effectively halting deliveries. of diesel. .
Due to the power cuts, the next few hours will be “crucial and difficult”, warned the Ministry of Health in Gaza.
A “preemptive strike” on Gaza
The UN Coordinator for Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha) in the Palestinian Territories, Lynn Hastings, called for “fuel, food and medical supplies” to be allowed into the enclave.
In Gaza City, residents have been sheltering in their homes all day, an AFP journalist noted.
It was the arrest of an Islamic Jihad leader in the West Bank earlier this week that led to this new confrontation. Fearing reprisals, Israeli authorities said they were launching a “preemptive strike” in Gaza, a micro-territory ruled by the Islamist movement Hamas and where Islamic Jihad is well established.
Israeli forces also arrested 19 members of the group considered terrorist by Israel, the United States and the European Union in the West Bank, territory occupied since 1967 by the Jewish state.
An “anti-terrorist operation”
This is the worst confrontation between the Jewish state and the armed organizations in Gaza since the May 2021 war, which in eleven days left 260 dead on the Palestinian side, including combatants, and 14 dead in Israel, including a soldier, according to the authorities. local. .
After the first raids, the organization accused the Jewish state of having “started a war”.
For the Israeli Prime Minister, Yair Lapid, it is a “precise anti-terrorist operation against an immediate threat”, that of the Islamic Jihad, “an auxiliary of Iran” who wants to “kill innocent Israelis”.
Hamas kept at bay
The Revolutionary Guards, Iran’s ideological army, threatened Israel with “paying a heavy price”, assuring that the Palestinians “were not alone”.
In 2019, the death of an Islamic Jihad commander in an Israeli operation had already led to several days of deadly exchanges of fire. Hamas, which has fought Israel in four wars since taking power in 2007, kept its distance.
For Jamal al-Fadi, professor of Political Science at Al-Azhar University in Gaza, Hamas does not want “to be dragged into a total war” and “since it does not get involved”, this new outbreak of violence should end. “in the days to come.”
“But if more civilians are killed, he will feel compelled to retaliate,” said Mairav Zonszein, an expert with the International Crisis Group (ICG).
Source: BFM TV
