The armed wing of Palestinian Hamas fired hundreds of rockets this Saturday morning, October 7, from the Gaza Strip, killing at least one person in Israel and ending a truce generally respected since the end of a five-day war between Israel and this territory in May. Rocket fire from several locations in the Gaza Strip began before 6:30 a.m. (4:30 a.m. in France) 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 crimes of the occupation (Israel),” the Al-Aqsa Brigades’ military wing said. The Israeli military said Hamas was behind a “combined attack, including rocket fire and terrorist infiltration into Israeli territory from the Gaza Strip.” A woman in her sixties was killed and 15 other people were injured in southern Israel, announced Magen David Adom, the Israeli equivalent of the Red Cross.
Twice in the morning, sirens sounded all the way to Jerusalem, where an AFP journalist saw two rockets intercepted in the sky. Several explosions were heard there around 9 a.m. (7 a.m. in France). 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.
A truce respected since the five-day war
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 the lives of 34 Palestinians. and an Israeli. 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.