New Delhi: Israel targeted sites in Gaza belonging to militant group Hamas in retaliation for rocket strikes.
Israel’s military said it had hit weapons sites early on Saturday in which two people died. Gaza’s Shifa hospital says that two bodies of Palestinians were found under the rubble of a Hamas military site bombed by Israeli planes overnight, bringing the death toll in the past 24 hours to four. Two Palestinians were also killed in clashes with Israeli troops at the Gaza border.
Three rockets were fired at Israel from Gaza late on Friday.
Israeli-Palestinian tensions have risen since President Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
Wednesday’s decision reversed decades of US neutrality on one of the most sensitive issues between the two sides.
Israel has always regarded Jerusalem as its capital, while the Palestinians claim East Jerusalem – occupied by Israel in the 1967 war – as the capital of a future Palestinian state.
The diplomatic fallout over Trump’s move has continued, with Palestinian officials saying that President Mahmoud Abbas will refuse to meet US Vice-President Mike Pence later this month.
Fathi Hammad, a senior Hamas leader, said shifting the embassy to Jerusalem is not a good idea and that anyone seeking to move their embassy to Jerusalem was “an enemy of the Palestinians”.
Speaking before the United Nations on Friday, US ambassador Nikki Haley said the US “recognizes the obvious; that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel”.
She said the US continued to be “committed to achieving a lasting peace agreement”, and accused the UN of bias, saying it “has outrageously been one of the world’s foremost centres of hostility towards Israel”.
Jerusalem is of huge importance to both Israel and the Palestinians as it contains sites sacred to the three major monotheistic faiths – Judaism, Islam and Christianity.
Israel occupied the eastern sector which was previously occupied by Jordan in 1967, and annexed it in 1980.
Some 330,000 Palestinians live in East Jerusalem, along with about 200,000 Israeli Jews in a dozen settlements there. The settlements are considered illegal under international law, however, Israel regards them as legitimate neighborhoods.
