GAZA CITY: Israel launched pre-dawn air strikes on the Palestinian group Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, according to the Israeli military, with the health ministry of the Hamas-controlled territory reporting 12 deaths.
The ministry stated that women and children were among those killed, but provided no further information about the victims’ identities.
Witnesses in Gaza described seeing a burning building and the quick evacuation of casualties.
The Israeli army claimed that the operation targeted three leaders of Islamic Jihad, whom they labelled as terrorists.
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The group confirmed the deaths of three senior officials, naming them as Jihad Ghannam, secretary of the Al-Quds Brigades military council, and Khalil al-Bahtini, also of the council and commander of the military wing in northern Gaza, in a statement.
Tareq Ezzedine, the third, was described as “one of the heads of military action” in the occupied West Bank who operated from Gaza by Islamic Jihad.
An AFP photographer witnessed the lifeless body of a man identified as Ghannam in Rafah, a city in the southern Gaza Strip.
“We mourn the leaders and their wives, as well as a number of their children, who were killed in a cowardly Zionist crime,” Islamic Jihad said in a statement, promising that “the blood of martyrs will increase (the) resolve” of the movement.
According to AFP journalists, the air strikes, which began shortly after 2 a.m., were still ongoing nearly two hours later, with a new explosion heard in the east.
The operation comes less than a week after Islamic Jihad announced a truce around Gaza, brokered with Egypt’s assistance, in response to a new outbreak of violence.
Following the death in Israeli custody of Khader Adnan, who had been on hunger strike for 87 days following his arrest for ties to Islamic Jihad, Israeli and Gaza fighters exchanged cross-border fire.
On Tuesday, the Islamic Jihad said Israel had “scorned all the initiatives of mediators” and vowed it would “avenge the leaders” killed in the latest air strikes.
Israeli Army
The Israeli army stated that it would “continue to operate for the security of civilians in the state of Israel” in separate statements detailing each of the Islamic Jihad figures killed.
Ghannan was described by the military as “one of the most senior members of the organisation,” “entrusted with coordinating weapons and money transfers between the Hamas terrorist organisation” and his movement.
According to Israel, Bahtini was “responsible for the rocket fire towards Israel in the last month.”
Ezzedine was recently “planning and directing multiple attacks against Israeli” civilians in the West Bank, where he was born and which Israel has occupied since the 1967 Six-Day War.
According to the army, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison by Israel for his involvement in suicide attacks in the 2000s before being released in a 2011 prisoner exchange and transferred to Gaza.
Since Hamas took control of the Palestinian enclave in 2007, Israel and Gaza have fought several wars.
Last August, a three-day conflict in Gaza killed 49 Palestinians but none on the Israeli side.
The deaths on Tuesday bring the total number of Palestinians killed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict this year to 120.
According to an AFP count based on official sources from both sides, nineteen Israelis, one Ukrainian, and one Italian were killed during the same period.
