JERUSALEM (AP) – Palestinian militants fired multiple rockets from the Gaza Strip into southern Israel early Thursday, and Israeli planes hit militant targets in Gaza, part of an escalation eerily similar to the run-up to last year’s Israel-Gaza war.
The cross-border strikes came amid Israeli-Palestinian tensions simmering in Jerusalem.
On Wednesday, hundreds of flag-waving Israeli ultra-nationalists marched towards the predominantly Palestinian areas surrounding Jerusalem’s Old City, in a demonstrative demonstration of Israeli control over the disputed city that Palestinians perceived as a provocation.
Police blocked the main road leading to the Old City’s Damascus Gate, the epicenter of last year’s unrest that preceded an 11-day war between Israel and Hamas. After some jostling with the police, the protesters gathered near the barricades, waving flags, chanting and chanting.
A hilltop shrine in the Old City is the emotional zero point of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a flashpoint of previous rounds of violence. Known to Muslims as Al-Aqsa Mosque, it is the third holiest site in Islam. It is also the holiest site in Judaism, revered by the Jews as the Temple Mount, the site of their biblical temples.
For the Palestinians, the mosque compound administered by Muslim clerics is also a rare place in Israel-annexed East Jerusalem where they have some measure of control. The Palestinians are looking to East Jerusalem, which Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East War, as a future capital.
Palestinian militant groups in Gaza — ruling Hamas and the smaller Islamic Jihad — have positioned themselves as defenders of Jerusalem’s holy site. On Wednesday, Hamas said Israel would bear “full responsibility for the impact” if it allowed protesters “to approach our holy sites.”
Several rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip overnight. Four rockets fired early Thursday were intercepted by Israel, the military said. There were no immediate reports of casualties or damage, and no one claimed the missile attacks. Israel blames Hamas for all rocket fire.
Israeli warplanes carried out a series of airstrikes in the central Gaza Strip early Thursday, local media reported. Social media posts by activists showed smoke in the air. The Israeli military said the airstrikes targeted a militant site and an entrance to a tunnel leading to an underground complex containing chemicals used to make rockets.
The military later said its planes attacked another Hamas compound after an anti-aircraft missile was fired from Gaza during the initial airstrikes. It said the missile failed to hit its target and no injuries or damage were reported.
Tensions have risen in recent weeks after a series of deadly attacks in Israel, Israeli military operations in the occupied West Bank and repeated clashes between Israelis and Palestinians at the Al-Aqsa compound.
Last May, Palestinian militants in Gaza fired rockets at Jerusalem as a much larger group of thousands of Israelis held a flag march into the Old City after weeks of protests and clashes in and around Al-Aqsa. These events led to an 11-day war between Israel and Hamas.
Israeli nationalists stage such marches to try to assert sovereignty over East Jerusalem, which Israel conquered and annexed along with the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967 in an internationally unrecognized move. The Palestinians aspire to an independent state in all three territories and regard East Jerusalem as their capital.
___
Associated Press writer Joseph Krauss in Jerusalem contributed to this report.