AMIR COHEN/REUTERS
Fighting between Israel and Islamic Jihad continued Saturday morning in the Gaza Strip.
MIDDLE EAST – Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip and Israel continue, this Saturday August 6, their exchanges of fire started the day before in what represents the worst outbreak of violence between the two enemies for a year.
At the beginning of the day, while the rocket warnings continued to sound in Israeli localities adjacent to the Palestinian territory under blockade, the AFP journalists could note that the city of Gaza under fire since Friday was paralyzed; the streets are deserted and the shops closed in this enclave under blockade of 2.3 million inhabitants undermined by poverty and unemployment.
The Israeli army continued until dawn its strikes across the enclave which targeted sites belonging to the Islamic Jihad; it says that it hit a weapons manufacturing site in particular and caused about fifteen deaths among the combatants. Gaza authorities reported 10 dead, including a five-year-old girl, and 79 injured.
Twenty arrests in the West Bank
The armed wing of Islamic Jihad, the Al-Quds brigades, said on Friday after a salvo of more than 100 rockets towards Israeli soil that it was only a “first response” to the assassination of a of its leaders in an Israeli strike. Overnight, Israeli forces also arrested in the West Bank, a territory occupied since 1967 by the Jewish state, 19 members of Islamic Jihad, an Islamist organization considered terrorist by Israel, the United States and the European Union.
It was the arrest earlier this week of a leader of the group in the occupied West Bank that led to this new armed confrontation. The Israeli authorities said they feared retaliatory actions from Gaza, a micro-territory governed by the Islamist movement Hamas and where Islamic Jihad is well established, and launched a “preventive attack”.
This is the worst confrontation between the Jewish state and armed organizations in Gaza since the 11-day war in May 2021, which left 260 dead on the Palestinian side, including combatants, and 14 dead in Israel, including a soldier, according to local authorities.
Egypt, a historic intermediary between Israel and armed groups in Gaza, is working to mediate and could host an Islamic Jihad delegation this Saturday, Egyptian officials told AFP in Gaza. Egyptian diplomacy had previously indicated that it was conducting discussions “relentlessly in order to calm the situation and preserve lives and property”.
Preemptive strikes, according to Israel
After the first raids, Islamic Jihad accused the Jewish state of having “started a war”. “The Zionist enemy started this aggression and must expect us to fight relentlessly,” said its secretary general, Ziad al-Nakhala, in an interview with Lebanese television Al-Mayadeen, in Tehran. Iranian capital.
“Israel has carried out a precise counter-terrorism operation against an immediate threat,” Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid said on television on Friday, accusing the armed group of being “a proxy for Iran who wants to destroy the state. of Israel and kill innocent Israelis”. “We will do whatever it takes to defend our people,” he said.
In 2019, the death of an Islamic Jihad commander in an Israeli operation had given rise to several days of deadly exchanges of fire between the armed group and Israel. Hamas, which has fought the Jewish state in four wars since taking power in 2007, had kept its distance from the clashes.
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