On Thursday morning, Israel bombed the Gaza Strip in response to rockets fired from the besieged coastal enclave. Plumes of black smoke were seen rising over one of the targeted locations north of Gaza city. Hours earlier, rockets had been fired from the Gaza Strip, with Israeli air defence systems intercepting five of them and the sixth falling in an uninhabited area. No Palestinian group has yet claimed responsibility for the rocket fire.
The rocket launches came after the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group condemned an Israeli military raid in Nablus on Wednesday as a “major crime” that the “resistance must respond to”. The raid was one of the deadliest Israeli operations in the occupied West Bank since the second Intifada or the Palestinian uprising of 2000-2005, leaving 11 dead and at least 100 wounded. Some 82 of them were hit by live ammunition, according to the Palestinian health ministry.
Witnesses described Israeli soldiers opening fire indiscriminately, with time-stamped security footage showing two young men, apparently unarmed, being shot as they ran in the street. The influx of wounded overwhelmed the city’s Najah Hospital.
Israel has stepped up its military raids, arrests and killings in Palestinian cities and villages in the occupied West Bank since June 2021, following a popular Palestinian uprising known as the “May outburst” that swept Israel and the Palestinian territories it has illegally occupied since 1967. Last year was the deadliest for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank since 2006, according to the United Nations, with the Israeli army killing 171 Palestinians in a military campaign launched following a series of individual Palestinian attacks inside Israel. So far this year, Israeli forces have killed some 62 Palestinians, including 13 children in the occupied territories.
The Israeli military raids have mainly occurred in Nablus and Jenin, which have become epicentres of Palestinian armed resistance and new youth groups fighting. Israel captured the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Middle East war, territories the Palestinians seek for an independent state. Palestinian statehood talks have been stalled for almost a decade.