Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad announced a truce around Gaza yesterday, after militants traded fire with Israel following the death in Israeli custody of a hunger striker from its ranks.
Mediators from Qatar, Egypt and the UN intervened to broker a return to calm from 4am, sources in Islamic Jihad and fellow militant group Hamas told reporters.
Israel did not immediately confirm the agreement.
Photo: AFP
The Israeli army said the last warning sirens sounded near the Gaza border at about 5:30am.
Witnesses in the blockaded Palestinian territory told reporters that several rockets were fired at Israel at about that time.
“One round of confrontation has ended, but the march of resistance continues and will not stop,” Islamic Jihad spokesman Tariq Salmi said in a statement.
“Our brave fighters have proven their loyalty and commitment to defending their people,” he added.
Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh demanded that Israel return the hunger striker’s body to his family.
“We stress — and as we have informed all the mediators who intervened — the necessity of handing over the body of the martyr Khader Adnan to his patient family,” Haniyeh said in a statement.
Adnan, 45, from Jenin in the occupied West Bank, died early on Tuesday after an 87-day hunger strike following his arrest by Israel over ties to Islamic Jihad.
A string of high-profile hunger strikes during at least 13 stints in Israeli custody had turned Adnan into a national hero, and revitalized hunger striking as a form of protest among Palestinians incarcerated in Israeli jails.
From Tuesday morning, about 100 rockets were fired by militant groups from Gaza toward Israel, Islamic Jihad said.
In response, the Israeli army said it carried out a number of airstrikes on Gaza early yesterday, targeting “weapons manufacturing sites, outposts, military complexes and an underground terror tunnel” belonging to Hamas.
“It [Hamas] will face the consequences,” the army added.
Israel generally holds Hamas responsible for all rocket fire from Gaza, regardless of which militant group launched it. The Islamist group has controlled the territory since ousting loyalists of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in 2007.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS