At least 160 rockets have been fired at Israel from the Gaza Strip in the past two days (5-6 August), Reuters reported last Saturday.
According to the Israeli side, most of the projectiles were intercepted by the Iron Dome anti-missile system.
The missile strikes on Israel were in response to Operation Dawn, deployed by the Jewish State Defense Forces (IDF) on August 5 against the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (an organization banned in Russia), the second strongest Palestinian group in Gaza after Hamas.
Airstrikes on targets in the Palestinian enclave killed 15 militants, including Taysir al-Jaabari, one of the Islamic Jihad’s leaders, the Israeli military command said.
The Gaza authorities, for their part, as of the evening of 6 August, said 12 Gazans had been killed, including one child, and more than 80 wounded.
The army operation in Gaza will last a week, an IDF spokesman said. A ceasefire has not yet been negotiated, he said.
Israeli Defence Minister Beni Gantz has signed an order calling up to 25,000 reservists for “operational purposes”.
The latest escalation in Gaza follows the August 1 arrest by the Israeli military of Bassem Saadi, leader of the Islamic Jihad in the West Bank. According to Prime Minister Yair Lapid, IDF strikes on the sector thwarted an attack on Israel that the Iranian-backed group was planning to carry out in response to Saadi’s arrest.
Major General Hossein Salami, commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), vowed that Israel would “pay a high price” for its “new crime” against the Palestinians.