Hamas has started ‘a war against the State of Israel,’ says Israeli defense minister
Hamas launched “a war against the State of Israel”, declared Yoav Galant, the Israeli defense minister. This attack comes 50 years after the Yom Kippur War which pitted Israel against an Arab military coalition led by Egypt and Syria from October 6 to 24, 1973.
Rocket fire from several locations in the Gaza Strip began before 6:30 a.m. and continued into the early morning. The Israeli army sounded sirens in the south and center of the country, urging people to stay near shelters.
For its part, the armed wing of Hamas, an armed Islamist movement which has controlled the Gaza Strip since 2007, announced that it had launched the “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation against Israel and launched more than 5,000 rockets. “We have decided to put an end to all the crimes of the occupation [Israël] », declared the armed wing of the Al-Aqsa Brigades. The Israeli military said Hamas was behind a “combined attack, including rocket fire and terrorist infiltration into Israeli territory from the Gaza Strip”. A rocket fell on the town of Yavne, south of Tel Aviv, where a man was slightly injured by shrapnel, according to Magen David Adom, the Israeli equivalent of the Red Cross. A woman in her sixties was killed and fifteen other people were injured in southern Israel, Magen David Adom announced.
In May, Israel launched an offensive against Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip, triggering a five-day war between the Israeli army, Islamic Jihad and other armed groups in the territory that cost thirty people their lives. four Palestinians and an Israeli woman. More than a thousand rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip towards Israel, most of them intercepted by the Israeli air defense system. Israel, for its part, had increased airstrikes on the small territory.
Hamas, which took power in Gaza in 2007, had stayed away from this conflict. Israel has imposed a strict blockade on the Gaza Strip since Hamas took control. Since the start of the year, violence linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has increased and cost the lives of at least 247 Palestinians, 33 Israelis, a Ukrainian and an Italian, according to an AFP count established from official sources. This toll includes, on the Palestinian side, combatants and civilians, and on the Israeli side, mostly civilians and three members of the Arab minority.