GAZA CITY: Israel targeted Hamas positions in southern Gaza late on Saturday after rockets were fired from the Palestinian enclave, security sources and the army said.

“Fighter jets, helicopters and tanks struck a rocket manufacturing site, and military posts belonging to the Hamas terror organisation,” Israel’s army said.

Palestinian sources said the army had targeted “a site of the al-Qassam Brigades, west of Khan Yunis” in southern Gaza, referring to the military wing of Hamas, the movement controlling the territory.

The sources also reported Israeli artillery fire on a Hamas observation base in northern Gaza.

Hamas condemned the Israeli strike, with a spokesman vowing “to defend our Palestinian people and liberate our land and our holy sites from the occupation and its colonial settlers until achieving the inevitable triumph”.

The Israeli strike came after two rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip on Saturday morning, falling into the Mediterranean Sea off Tel Aviv.

No warning sirens sounded and Israel’s Iron Dome rocket interception system did not deploy, the army said in a statement.

Sources in Hamas said that “the firing of the two rockets on Saturday morning was a technical problem due to the bad weather”.

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett addressed the Hamas explanation on Sunday morning.

“All of Hamas’s stories about lightning and thunder, that repeat themselves winter after winter, are no longer relevant,” he said at the beginning of the weekly cabinet meeting.

“Whoever aims missiles at the State of Israel will bear the consequences.” Israel has maintained a blockade on the impoverished enclave since 2007, the year Hamas took power.

Last year Hamas fired barrages of rockets towards Israel during an 11-day conflict sparked by tensions in Jerusalem.

A fragile ceasefire came into force in late May.

Since then, only five rockets or mortar rounds were fired from Gaza towards Israeli territory, the military had said in an annual report released at the end of December, before the latest launches.

According to some analysts, it was not clear whether the rockets were meant to hit Israel, but Gaza-based militant groups often test-fire missiles toward the sea.

There were no reports of casualties from Saturday’s rocket launches.

Apart from the single incident in September, there has been no cross-border rocket fire since a ceasefire ended the 11-day war between Israel and Hamas in May. The ceasefire, brokered by Egypt and other mediators, has been fragile.

Hamas says Israel did not take serious steps to ease the blockade it imposed on Gaza with Egypt’s help when the Islamic movement seized control of the coastal enclave in 2007.

Tension are also high as other groups like the smaller Islamic Jihad threaten military escalation if Israel doesn’t end the administrative detention of a Palestinian prisoner who has been on a hunger strike for over 130 days.

Published in Dawn, January 3rd, 2022