Violence between Israelis and Palestinians entered its fourth day as rocket attacks on Israeli cities and airstrikes in the Gaza Strip continued early Thursday and casualties climbed on both sides.
Sirens blared through the night across Israel as the militant group Hamas fired 130 rockets from Gaza, with at least one striking a suburb of Tel Aviv, causing injuries and significant damage, according to Israeli officials.
In Gaza, residents awoke on the normally joyous Eid al-Fitr holiday to pillars of smoke rising from sites bombed by Israeli forces, which said they had conducted overnight operations against Hamas, which controls Gaza.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said the death toll rose to 69 Palestinians, including 16 children, the Associated Press reported.
Seven Israelis, including six civilians and one soldier, have been killed, the Israeli army said Thursday morning. The civilians include a teenage girl and a young boy who died Wednesday evening after a rocket penetrated his family’s bomb shelter in Sderot near the border with Gaza, local media reported.
[Netanyahu says Israel will escalate military campaign against Hamas]
The Israeli army has struck 600 targets in Gaza since the conflict began, according to spokesman Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, who raised the possibility of a ground assault on Gaza.
Two infantry brigades and one armor brigade were readying for ground operations under the “guidance” of the Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, Conricus said. No orders to launch ground operations have been given, he added, but the troops are preparing for if or when it comes.
Mohammed Salem
Reuters
The ruins of buildings destroyed by Israeli air strikes, in the northern Gaza Strip on Thursday.
Despite a flurry of diplomatic activity, there were no indications that Hamas or another militant group, Islamic Jihad, were stopping their attacks, Conricus said.
Israeli army intelligence indicates that while the militants have fired more than 1,600 rockets — 400 of which have fallen short inside Gaza — they are not close to running out, he added.
Clashes also continued overnight on the streets of Israeli cities between Jewish and Arab Israelis, prompting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to announce he would deploy the military to quell the “anarchy.”
[What’s behind the violence in Israel and Gaza?]
“What is happening in Israel’s cities over the past few days is unacceptable,” Netanyahu said on Twitter of the worst Jewish-Arab violence inside Israel in decades. “We have seen Arab rioters set fire to synagogues and vehicles and attack police officers. They are attacking peaceful and innocent citizens.”
The prime minister also alluded to an incident on Wednesday in which video footage showed a group of Jewish nationalists dragging a man who they believed to be Arab out of his car and beating him in the central city of Bat Yam.
“This is something that we cannot accept; it is anarchy,” Netanyahu said. “Nothing justifies this and I will tell you that nothing justifies the lynching of Jews by Arabs and nothing justifies the lynching of Arabs by Jews.”
Gil Cohen-Magen
AFP/Getty Images
An Israeli man displays the damage after a rocket attack from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, in the central Israeli city of Petah Tikva, on Thursday.
Netanyahu said he had ordered police to adopt “emergency powers,” and intended to “bring in military forces according to the existing law and we will pass an additional law if necessary.”
Not long after he spoke, police reported two people injured in a shooting in the central city of Lod, according to the Associated Press. The mixed Arab-Jewish town has become a center of unrest following the fatal shooting of an Arab Israeli man this week, and remains under heavy police patrol and nighttime lockdown.
Some 400 people were arrested overnight following riots throughout the country, the Times of Israel reported early Thursday, citing police. It added that 36 officers were injured.
As the violence continues, the International Criminal Court’s main prosecutor said she is closely watching Israel and Hamas for potential war crimes.
“I note with great concern the escalation of violence in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, as well as in and around Gaza, and the possible commission of crimes under the Rome Statute,” Fatou Bensouda said in a statement posted on Twitter Wednesday, referring to the court’s statute on crimes against humanity and war crimes.
The current conflict was triggered after clashes earlier this month in Jerusalem among Palestinians, Israeli police and right-wing Jews. Tensions have been running high, in part, because of efforts by Israeli settlers to evict several Palestinian families from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem.
What’s behind the violence in Israel and Gaza?
Netanyahu says Israel will escalate military campaign against Hamas
For first time in two decades, mass protests erupt among Israel’s Arab citizens
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