Gaza conflict intensifies with rocket barrages and air strikes

Palestinian militants fired more rockets into Israel’s commercial heartland on Thursday as Israel kept up a punishing bombing campaign in Gaza and massed tanks and troops on the enclave’s border.

The four days of cross-border violence showed no sign of abating and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the campaign “will take more time”.

The violence has also spread to mixed communities of Jews and Arabs in Israel, a new front in the long conflict.


Synagogues were attacked and fighting broke out on the streets of some communities, prompting Israel’s president to warn of the danger of civil war.

Worried that the region’s worst hostilities in years could spiral out of control, the United States is sending an envoy, Hady Amr. Truce efforts by Egypt, Qatar and the United Nations have so far offered no sign of progress.

In renewed air strikes on Gaza, Israeli warplanes struck a six-storey residential building that it said belonged to Hamas, the Islamist group that controls the Palestinian enclave. Netanyahu said Israel has struck close to a thousand militant targets in Gaza in total.

The Gaza health ministry said 87 people, including 18 children and eight women, have been killed and 530 others wounded - further straining hospitals already under heavy pressure during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“We are facing Israel and Covid-19. We are in between two enemies,” said Asad Karam, 20, a construction worker, standing beside a road damaged during the air strikes. An electricity pole had collapsed by the road, its wires severed.