GAZA/JERUSALEM: At least three Palestinians were killed in an Israeli airstrike in the Gaza Strip on Sunday, hours after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed a “powerful response” to any attacks from the territory.
An Israeli army spokesman said an Israeli aircraft carried out an airstrike against militants spotted preparing to launch rockets toward Israel. “We won’t tolerate the firing of rockets into Israel and we will respond harshly as we did now,” he said.
Earlier Palestinians fired four mortar rounds at southern Israel, without causing casualties.
The air raid struck east of Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, and the bodies of the three were taken to a hospital in the town, said Muawiya Hassanein, head of Gaza emergency services.
The dead were all members of the Islamic Jihad group, he said.
Netanyahu told a weekly Cabinet session 20 mortar bombs and rockets had been fired at Israel from the Hamas-ruled territory last week. “I view this very seriously. The government’s policy is clear, any shooting at our territory will receive an immediate and powerful response,” he said.
Violence has risen along the Israeli-Gaza frontier in the past month, which could further complicate US-backed diplomacy in the region, after a respite following a three-week Gaza war a year ago in which 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis died.
Three Palestinians were killed in a series of Israeli airstrikes in Gaza on Thursday, including the first air raid in months to target a site inside Gaza City.
Israel also dropped leaflets warning Gaza’s 1.5 million residents to avoid coming within 300 meters of the border fence with Israel, citing security reasons.
Netanyahu told his Cabinet Israel had targeted factories used to make rockets and tunnels along Gaza’s border with Egypt, where “Iran smuggles in missiles and rockets” into Gaza.
Turning his attention to the occupied West Bank, where Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah movement holds sway, Netanyahu demanded leaders there “stop incitement” that violated a US-backed peace roadmap.
He charged a public square had been named in the West Bank for a militant involved in a lethal 1978 bus attack in Israel, and that three other militants Israel killed after they gunned down a Jewish settler have been hailed as martyrs.
“This is not the way to make peace,” Netanyahu said.
Abbas has refused to resume negotiations with Israel, stalled for a year, before a halt to Jewish settlement building in the West Bank which Palestinians see as an obstacle to achieving a two-state solution of their conflict with Israel.
Abbas has rejected a limited, 10-month halt to settlement building announced by Israel in November as insufficient.
