Explosions in the Gaza Strip after Israeli airstrikes on the night of June 15-16, 2021. – Mahmud hams / AFP
After a three-week lull, the situation suddenly became tense during the night. The Israeli air force carried out strikes in the Gaza Strip early Wednesday after the launching of incendiary balloons on Tuesday from the Palestinian territory into southern Israel, according to Palestinian security sources and witnesses.
These strikes and balloons are the first major incidents between Israel and Gaza since a ceasefire on May 21, which ended 11 days of a lightning war that left 260 dead on the Palestinian side, including children, adolescents and combatants; and 13 deaths in Israel, including a child, a teenage girl and a soldier.
According to Palestinian sources, the Israeli air force targeted at least one site east of Khan Younès, a town in the south of the Gaza Strip, an impoverished enclave of two million inhabitants, including about a thousand apartments, offices. and businesses were destroyed in the last war with Israel, the fourth since 2008. An AFP photographer in Khan Younes also saw explosions.
Twenty fires in southern Israel
These are the first Israeli strikes against this Palestinian territory, under the control of Islamists Hamas and under Israeli blockade, since the coming to power on Sunday evening of a motley coalition that ended 12 years of reign of Benjamin Netanyahu.
These strikes and the launching of incendiary balloons, which have caused about twenty fires in southern Israel according to local firefighters, take place on the sidelines of nationalist and far-right protests in East Jerusalem which have brought together more than a thousand people.
The United States and the UN had called for “restraint” before this controversial march that the new Israeli government of Naftali Bennett, in office since Sunday, had authorized while marking out its route to avoid confrontations with the Palestinians.
The Hamas movement had threatened Israel with reprisals if this march celebrating the takeover and annexation of East Jerusalem, the Palestinian sector of the Holy City, by the Israeli army in 1967, ventured into the neighborhoods in particular. Muslims in the Old City.