“Congratulations to the resistance men who met the warplanes with our air defense,” Hazem Qassem, a Hamas spokesman, said in a statement.
He assured that the Israeli forces attacked “empty places”.
The alarm went off on Monday night in southern Israel when a rocket was launched from the Gaza Strip, the first since early January.
“A rocket was fired from the Gaza Strip towards Israeli territory and was intercepted by the Iron Dome defense system,” the Israeli military said in a statement.
The launch was not claimed but it comes after a series of attacks in Israel –two of them perpetrated by Palestinians in Tel Aviv–, “anti-terrorist” operations in the occupied West Bank and a weekend of tension in the holy places of Jerusalem.
Those attacks have left 14 dead since March 22 in Israel, while 22 Palestinians, including the attackers, have been killed in Israeli incidents or operations in the West Bank, a Palestinian territory occupied by Israel since 1967.
In Jerusalem, more than 150 Palestinians were injured in clashes with Israeli forces on Friday at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the third holiest site in Islam and also considered the first holy site in Judaism (under the name of Temple Mount). ).
On Sunday, new clashes broke out in and around this holy site, which some Jews had visited, which was considered an affront by some Muslims. And on the same day, Palestinian youths were arrested after throwing stones at Israeli civilian buses near the site.
A 2021 reissue?
Last year, clashes in Jerusalem at the same time of year prompted Hamas to launch salvos of rockets from Loop toward Israel, which responded by bombing the Palestinian territory of 2.3 million people, causing a 11 day war.
According to security sources and Israeli analysts, Hamas — which approved of the recent attacks in Israel — does not want a war now.
In the first place, because the military capacities of the Islamist movement were affected by the may 2021 war.
And secondly, because in the event of a conflict, the new Israeli government risks suspending the thousands of work permits granted in recent months to workers in Gaza, a territory under blockade with a local unemployment rate close to 50%. .
The Islamic Jihad, the main Palestinian armed Islamist group after Hamas, but which unlike Hamas does not administer the Gaza Strip, threatened on Monday with a new military escalation.
“We cannot keep silent about what is happening in Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank,” said Ziad Al Nakhale, head of Islamic Jihad.whose movement has thousands of fighters and rockets in Gaza, according to Israeli intelligence.
The recent incidents on the Temple Mount have also soured relations between Israel and Jordan, which summoned the Israeli chargé d’affaires on Monday and handed him a protest letter demanding an end to Israel’s “illegal and provocative violations”.
Jordan, linked to Israel by a peace treaty since 1994, administers the Temple Mount, where the Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock are located, but access to it is controlled by Israel.
Source: Ambito
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