CAIRO (Reuters) -Israeli military strikes across the Gaza Strip killed at least 29 Palestinians on Friday, medics said, and sirens blared in southern Israel in response to renewed rocket fire from militants in the Palestinian enclave.
The new rocket salvoes indicated that Hamas-led militant factions in Gaza are still able to fire projectiles into Israel despite a year-long Israeli aerial and ground offensive that has turned wide areas of the enclave into wasteland.
On Friday, the Israeli military said sirens sounded in southern Israel for the first time in around two months.
“Almost a year after Oct. 7, Hamas is still threatening our civilians with their terrorism and we will continue operating against them,” it added, referring to the anniversary of Hamas’ cross-border attack that touched off the Gaza war.
In Gaza City in north Gaza, Palestinian health officials said one Israeli aerial strike on a house killed at least seven people. Four people including two women and a baby were killed in the bombing of a home in the southern city of Khan Younis.
The rest were killed in airstrikes on several areas across the densely populated coastal enclave. Residents said Israeli forces operating in Gaza City’s Zeitoun suburb and in Rafah, near the southern border with Egypt, blew up clusters of homes.
Israel’s military says Hamas combatants use crowded, built-up residential neighbourhoods as cover. Hamas denies this.
Israel media, reporting on the rocket fire, said one rocket was intercepted by air defence and another crashed in an open area. There were no reports of casualties or notable damage.
Palestinians in Gaza will mark the first anniversary of the war next week with little hope of an end to the fighting in the foreseeable future, even as Israel pursues a new ground incursion into Lebanon against Hamas’ major Iranian-backed ally Hezbollah.
Hezbollah began firing rockets into northern Israel almost a year ago in support of Hamas after the Palestinian Islamist movement staged the deadliest assault in Israel’s history on Oct. 7, 2023.
The attack, in which Israel says 1,200 people were killed and over 250 taken hostage, ignited the war that has devastated Gaza, displacing most of its 2.3 million population and killing over 41,800 people, according to Gaza health authorities.
International diplomacy led by the United States has so far failed to clinch a ceasefire deal in Gaza. Hamas wants an agreement that ends the war while Israel says fighting can only end when Hamas is eradicated.
(Reporting asnd writing by Nidal al-Mughrabi; editing by Mark Heinrich)