Thursday, March 24, 2011

Gaza Strip fired rockets into central Israel

Palestinian rockets struck targets in central Israel, near urban villages south of Tel Aviv, while Israeli jets aimed at targets in Gaza, in an increasingly heated dispute that has sparked fears of another war. Israeli police said the long-range Grad rockets fired from the Gaza Strip ruled by Hamas, hit Ashdod and an area north of the Mediterranean port.

There were no immediate reports of casualties. Emergency services said one of the rockets landed near Yavneh, a town about 45 kilometers from Gaza and about 20 kilometers from Tel Aviv. This area was bombed between December 2008 and January 2009 during the war in Gaza. Violence on the border of Gaza has worsened in recent days and a bomb attack Wednesday in Jerusalem, which Israeli police blamed on Palestinian militants, left a woman dead and 39 wounded.

It was the first such bombing in the city since 2004. Great Britain identified the woman who died as a British citizen and the police in Israel said it was a tourist. The Israeli military said five rockets and a mortar shell fired from Gaza exploded in Israel, causing no casualties. Schools remained closed in Ashdod and Beersheba, a town in the Negev desert that has suffered several attacks in the last week.

Israeli aircraft carried out a series of attacks in Gaza, mainly against smuggling tunnels located along the Gaza-Egypt border, a Hamas training camp, a group of rocket and a power transformer, causing blackouts the enclave. The medical staff said no one was injured. "The responsibility rests entirely on Hamas (...) we know how to act and we have proven in the past, we will attack proportionally when necessary," the Israeli Civil Defense Minister Matan Vilnai told Israel Radio.

Israel said the air strikes were a response to a recent flurry of rockets. Hamas says its attacks last week have been in response to Israel. Five Palestinian militants and four civilians, three of them children, were killed by Israeli fire in Gaza on Tuesday. The upsurge in violence in recent days after months of relative calm, has raised fears of another war between Israel and the Islamist group Hamas, which governs the small Mediterranean coastal territory since 2007.

On Wednesday, soldiers in Gaza fired more than a dozen rockets and mortar bombs along the border. In the occupied West Bank, the militant group Islamic Jihad said two of its leaders were arrested by security forces of the Palestinian Authority, with support from the West, for questioning about the bombing in Jerusalem.

No group claimed responsibility for the bomb, which exploded near a bus stop.

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