Mohammed Salem Reuters
JERUSALEM — A day of upheaval at the holy sites of this contested city quickly widened into a night of warlike violence in communities across the country early Tuesday, with hundreds of rockets from the Gaza Strip causing injuries in Israeli neighborhoods and retaliatory airstrikes killing at least 22 Gazans, according to officials there.
Clashes also broke out in the West Bank between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers, as well as between Jewish residents, Israeli police and Arab citizens in Arab-Israeli towns and mixed Jewish-Arab towns, leading to hundreds of arrests and at least one Palestinian fatality.
The armed exchanges, the worst eruption of violence between Israel and Palestinians in recent years, continued into a second day as security officials braced for fighting to escalate even further. Schools in several parts of Israel were closed Tuesday.
[What is happening in Jerusalem and Gaza?]
https://ift.tt/3xXPHlr
Air-raid sirens sounded every few minutes in towns where many Israelis had already passed the night in bomb shelters. On Tuesday afternoon, more than 70 rockets struck southern Israel within the span of half an hour, including in the Israeli coastal city of Ashkelon just north of Gaza, according to media reports. At least four members of a family were reported injured when one rocket hit an eight-story apartment building.
“We fired rockets at Ashkelon following an Israeli attack and an attack on a house west of Gaza City,” said a spokesman for Hamas’s military wing. “If Israel continues to attack, we will turn Ashkelon into hell.”
Later Tuesday, three injured Israelis were hospitalized after rockets hit a school and residential buildings in Ashkelon and Ashdod.
Military officials said more than 350 rockets had been launched from Gaza since the start of the flare-up, although more than a third of them failed to cross into Israel and exploded, landing inside the enclave itself. The army’s expansive antimissile defense network, known as Iron Dome, destroyed more than 90 percent of the rockets that reached Israeli airspace, the army said.
In response to the launches, the Israel Defense Forces carried out sustained retaliatory strikes inside the Gaza Strip overnight and into the morning, with warplanes conducting more than 140 attacks. The IDF said it killed 15 Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters in strikes that targeted rocket manufacturing and storage sites, training and military complexes, two underground tunnels and the home of a battalion commander.
Hatem Moussa
AP
Smoke rises after Israeli forces strike in Gaza City, Tuesday, May 11, 2021.
Images from the Shati refugee camp near Gaza City on Tuesday morning showed scenes of destruction following at least one Israeli airstrike that appeared to target the top floor of a nearby residential building. The building’s concrete rooftop collapsed onto the apartment below, where residents were shown picking through the rubble.
Palestinian news agencies reported that two people were killed in a strike in the Shati camp. In separate images, children in the camp’s cramped quarters near the sea sifted through the debris of a strike that also damaged their home.
Palestinian health officials said nine children were among the dead in Gaza. Video on social media showed grieving families amid the rubble of damaged buildings. An Israeli military spokesman said the army would conduct an investigation into reports of children killed. He blamed Hamas, the Islamist militant group that governs Gaza, for embedding weapons and launch sites in civilian areas.
[Hamas and Israel exchange rocket fire following contentious ‘Jerusalem Day’ clashes]
“We go to great lengths to strike only military targets,” said army spokesman Jonathan Conricus. “They are in houses, courtyards, near schools and mosques.”
World leaders beseeched both sides to rein in their forces and avoid a further escalation. But there were few signs Tuesday that the conflict would ease quickly. Hamas pledged to maintain rocket launches in retaliation for recent Israeli police incursions into Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque, considered Islam’s third-holiest site and a frequent flash point in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
On Tuesday morning, the Israeli military called up eight reserve border police battalions and received government approval to call up another 5,000 reservists from various units. It also deployed artillery batteries in the towns near the Gaza Strip and said it was boosting its anti-rocket systems around Gaza.
The Israeli army has its “foot on the gas,” and attacks on the Gaza Strip are likely to intensify in the coming days, said IDF spokesman Hidai Zilberman.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convened an emergency security meeting Tuesday with Defense Minister Benny Gantz, IDF Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi, Shin Bet chief Nadav Argaman, National Security Council chief Meir Ben Shabbat and other senior officials in Tel Aviv.
Abbas Momani
AFP/Getty Images
Israeli soldiers fire tear gas at Palestinian demonstrators during an anti-Israel protest over tension in Jerusalem, at the Qalandiya checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem, in the occupied West Bank, on May 11, 2021.
The Monday night fighting erupted after days of clashes in Jerusalem, where tensions have been mounting over the pending eviction of several Arab families from the city’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. Near-daily protests in the neighborhood have built up as Israel’s High Court prepares to rule on a decades-long property dispute that could result in the families losing their houses to a group of Jewish Israelis.
That standoff widened in recent days as Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, brought swelling crowds to al-Aqsa and a series of violent clashes with Israeli police. More than 300 Palestinians were injured Monday, when thousands of nationalist Israelis also poured into the Old City to mark Israel’s 1967 takeover of Arab East Jerusalem.
Monday evening, seven Gaza-launched rockets streaked toward Jerusalem, triggering air-raid sirens around the city and causing residents to seek cover. One rocket damaged a house in a Jerusalem suburb without causing injuries. The attack, the first to target the city since 2014, shocked Israeli officials and set the stage for a major escalation. Netanyahu declared that Hamas had crossed “a red line.”
[How a Jerusalem neighborhood reignited the Israeli-Palestinian conflict]
Neighboring countries, reportedly including Egypt and Qatar, worked behind the scenes to ease the tensions. But protests were reported in Arab nations around the region as Muslims rallied around calls to defend al-Aqsa and East Jerusalem from Israeli aggression.
In the mixed Jewish-Arab Israeli city of Lod, mostly young Arab protesters threw stones and fireworks at passersby and police and torched cars, trees and a military prep school that contained a synagogue. Jewish students grabbed Torah scrolls as they evacuated the building.
Mussa Hasson, a 25-year-old resident of the city, was shot to death after a man whose identity is still unknown opened fire on a group of mostly young Arab protesters who were carrying Palestinian flags. Four other Arab protesters were injured. A Jewish man and another unidentified man who are suspected of involvement in the shooting were taken into police custody.
Hundreds of Arab protesters who had accompanied wounded colleagues to Assaf Harofeh Hospital in central Israel threw stones, vandalized equipment and intimidated both Jewish and Arab medical staff. The staff moved the injured patients to different parts of the hospital while Israeli police fired stun grenades to disperse the crowds.
Erin Cunningham in Istanbul and Hazem Balousha in Gaza City, contributed to this report.
World - Latest - Google News
May 11, 2021 at 05:58PM
https://ift.tt/3f6FoTu
After Jerusalem erupts, deadly strikes and clashes spread across Israel and the Palestinian territories - The Washington Post
World - Latest - Google News
https://ift.tt/2SeTG7d
https://ift.tt/35oCZy1
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "After Jerusalem erupts, deadly strikes and clashes spread across Israel and the Palestinian territories - The Washington Post"
Post a Comment