Israel threatened more strikes against Hamas on Monday hours after aircraft bombed Gaza Strip in response to new rocket. Israeli aircraft late on Sunday targeted an empty police station in central Gaza and some seven tunnels along the Gaza Strip's southern border with Egypt, witnesses said.
The action came two weeks after the end of an Israeli offensive that left more than 1,300 Palestinians dead. There were no reports of casualties in the latest strikes on the Hamas outpost and the tunnels.
According to AFP, the Israeli army confirmed carrying out strikes "in response to barrages of Qassam rockets and mortar shells fired at Israel." According to witnesses, hundreds of Palestinian workers involved in tunnel construction in southern Gaza fled to the Egyptian side of the border shortly after the bombing started.
Later, one Palestinian was killed and four others were wounded in an Israeli air strike in the Strip on Monday, medical sources and witnesses said. The attack in the southern town of Rafah targeted a vehicle carrying members of the Popular Resistance Committee, a small Palestinian group, the source said.
Palestinian gunners in Gaza Strip fired more than 10 rockets and mortar rounds onto southern Israel on Sunday, wounding one civilian and two troops.
Israel's Defence Minister Ehud Barak said although most of the rockets were not fired by Hamas, it is responsible for the attacks. "We are responding and we will continue to retaliate. We know that most of the fire was not carried out by Hamas but by other small organisations, but Hamas is responsible. Hamas must act to stop this.
"We need calm in the south, and that is the test.... If there is no calm we will have to act again," Barak, who heads the centre-left Labour party in the upcoming February 10 elections, warned on public radio.
