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Hamas rocket fire from Gaza hits Israel
JERUSALEM, June 27, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – Hamas militants fired a dozen
projectiles at Israel overnight, the Israeli army said Wednesday, in what the
territory’s Islamist rulers said was their response to Israeli targeting of
Palestinian civilians.
The projectiles, which Israeli media said included rockets, caused no
casualties or damage.
Three of them were destroyed in flight by Israel’s Iron Dome air defence
system, an army spokesman told AFP.
Hamas said its military wing was retaliating against Israeli fire against
Palestinian civilians, which has seen at least 134 Gazans killed since
protests along the border began on March 30. There have been no Israeli
deaths.
“The occupation’s escalation and its targeting of the peaceful Palestinian
protesters as well as the Palestinian fighters prompted (an) immediate
response,” Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said.
“Every silly measure taken by the Israeli occupation against the
Palestinians proves the failure of the Israeli policies and miscalculation of
the Israeli plans,” Barhoum added in an English-language statement.
Late on Tuesday, an Israeli air strike and tank fire targeted a vehicle
belonging to a Hamas official “heavily involved” in launching kites and
balloons fitted with incendiaries over the border, the army said.
Two Hamas observation posts in northern Gaza were also hit, the army said.
There were no reports of casualties on the Palestinian side.
The fire kites and balloons have caused huge crop losses on Israeli farms
near the border prompting Israeli threats to demand compensation from the
West Bank-based Palestinian Authority.
Since March 30, Gazans have been demonstrating along the heavily guarded
border in protest at Israel’s decade-long blockade of the territory and in
support of the Palestinians’ right to return to lands they fled or were
driven from during the war surrounding the creation of Israel in 1948.
The demonstrations peaked when at least 62 Palestinians were killed as
thousands approached the border fence in protest at Washington’s moving of
its embassy to Israel from Tel Aviv to the disputed city of Jerusalem on May
14.
Israel insists the whole of Jerusalem is its “eternal indivisible capital”
but the Palestinians claim the eastern sector, which Israel occupied in the
Six-Day War of 1967 and later annexed, as the capital of their future state.
BSS/AFP/MSY/1337 hrs