The Israeli army assured Saturday evening to have “neutralized” the “military” leaders of the Islamic Jihad group in Gaza, during operations which according to the authorities of the Palestinian enclave left more than 20 dead, including six children.
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In the evening, Oded Basiok, the head of the operations department of the Hebrew State army, sent a press release to AFP in which he affirmed that “the senior leadership of the military wing of the Islamic Jihad in Gaza has been neutralized”.
“The battle is only at its beginning,” said earlier Mohammed Al-Hindi, a leader of this armed group which fires rockets towards Israeli soil.
Egyptian sources told AFP that Cairo, a historic intermediary between Israel and the armed groups in Gaza, was trying to establish a mediation. During a speech, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sissi said he was working “tirelessly” to restore calm.
But on the ground, the exchange of fire continued in the night from Saturday to Sunday, according to AFP journalists in Gaza.
Israel is “not currently conducting ceasefire negotiations,” an Israeli military spokesman said.
The Israeli army began striking the blockaded enclave of 2.3 million people on Friday in a “preemptive strike” against Islamic Jihad, she said.
In retaliation, about 400 projectiles – rockets and mortar shells – have been launched in the past 24 hours from Gaza, according to an Israeli official. Most were intercepted by the missile shield, the army said, and two people were lightly injured by shrapnel, rescue workers said.
Saturday afternoon, warning sirens sounded in the Israeli metropolis of Tel Aviv for the first time since this new escalation.
Hostilities have already deprived Gaza, a small strip of land wedged between Egypt, the Mediterranean and Israel, of its only power station.
It “stopped (working) due to a shortage” of fuel, the electricity company said on Saturday. The Jewish state has sealed off border crossings in recent days, effectively interrupting diesel deliveries.
The UN Humanitarian Affairs Coordinator (Ocha) in the Palestinian Territories, Lynn Hastings, called for allowing the entry into the enclave of “fuel, food and medical supplies”.
It was the arrest of an Islamic Jihad leader in the West Bank earlier this week that led to this new confrontation. Fearing reprisals, the Israeli authorities said they were launching an operation in Gaza, a micro-territory ruled by the Islamist movement Hamas and where Islamic Jihad is well established.
Israeli forces also arrested in the West Bank, territory occupied since 1967 by the Jewish state, 19 members of the group considered terrorist by Israel, the United States and the European Union.
After the initial raids, Islamic Jihad accused the Jewish state of having “started a war”.
For Yaïr Lapid, it is a “precise counter-terrorism operation against an immediate threat”, that of Islamic Jihad, “an auxiliary of Iran” wanting to “kill innocent Israelis”.
In 2019, the death of an Islamic Jihad commander in an Israeli operation had already given rise to several days of deadly exchanges of fire. Hamas, which has fought Israel in four wars since taking power in 2007, kept its distance.