TEL AVIV — Israeli airstrikes hit several targets in the Gaza Strip on Friday, killing a number of people, including a senior Palestinian militant group commander in the deadliest escalation of violence in the territory since last May’s 11-day war.
The strikes hit residential apartments as well as militant outposts, killing at least 10 people, including a 5-year-old girl, and wounding 55, Gaza’s health ministry said. An airstrike killed Taysir al-Jabari, a senior military leader of Islamic Jihad, the second largest militant group in Gaza, according to Islamic Jihad and the Israeli military.
The escalation followed one of the least violent phases in Gaza in several years. As of May 2021, there have been relatively few exchanges of fire between Israel and Palestinian militants in the territory as tensions have shifted to the occupied West Bank. Both Israel and Hamas, the militant group that dominates Gaza, have indicated they have sought to avoid another full-scale air war over the enclave, which has been under an Israeli and Egyptian blockade since 2007.
But the unusual intensity of violence prompted warnings of reprisals from the main Palestinian militant groups in Gaza and raised the prospect of days of conflict.
The airstrikes followed nearly a week of rising tensions between Israel and Islamic Jihad, a less powerful militant group that often operates independently of Hamas. Israel arrested one of the group’s senior commanders in the West Bank this week, leading to threats of retaliation from the group’s leadership in Gaza.
Islamic Jihad had not yet responded to the arrest with an attack, but Israel said it was prepared to do so and had targeted Mr Al-Jabari and other members of the group as a precaution to prevent it.
“Israel will not allow terrorist organizations to set the agenda in the Gaza Strip and threaten the citizens of the State of Israel,” Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid said shortly after the attack.
Israel closed the crossings to the Gaza Strip this week in anticipation of a retaliatory attack following the arrest in the West Bank.
After the airstrikes, Islamic Jihad said it would respond with force and towns in southern Israel opened bomb shelters in anticipation of rockets from Gaza.
“The enemy has launched a war against our people and we must all defend ourselves and our people,” an Islamic Jihad statement said.
It was not immediately clear whether Hamas would join Islamic Jihad, after signaling for months that it wanted to avoid another major war so soon after the May 2021 conflict. In the past, Hamas has occasionally sat on the sidelines as Islamic Jihad clashed with Israel.
But in a statement on Friday, a Hamas spokesman, Fawzi Barhoum, said Israel had started the escalation against resistance groups in Gaza “and must pay the price and bear full responsibility for it”. He added that all armed groups in Gaza were united in the fight against Israel.
Rescuers evacuated a wounded man after the airstrike. Credit…Mohammed Salem/Reuters
Plumes of smoke rose over the Gaza skyline and on the ground, crowds of rescuers, medics and onlookers gathered on the street near the site where the Islamic Jihad commander had been killed. Photos posted online showed the commander being carried through a crowd and a grieving man carrying a dead child covered in a shroud.
Fady Hanona and Iyad Abu Hweila contributed reporting from Gaza City.
