GAZA, Friday, June 14, 2019 (WAFA) – Israeli war jets struck early Friday several targets in the besieged Gaza Strip, causing damage but no human casualties.
WAFA correspondent reported that F-16 warplanes pounded with three missiles a site located to the east of Zeitoun neighborhood, southeast of Gaza city, reducing it to rubble and causing damage to neighboring civilian houses.
Israeli warplanes also targeted the seaport area, west of Khan Younes city, with two missiles, leveling it.
Meanwhile, Israeli artillery fired several shells towards a farmland to the east of Rafah city in the southern strip, causing material damage.
No injuries were reported though in any of these attacks.
Israel claimed that the latest round of airstrikes in the war-battered strip came in retaliation for the launching of a rocket Thursday night from the war-torn strip into southern Israel, which caused a damage to a house.
No Palestinian faction has claimed responsibility for the rocket attack.
Israel has maintained a crippling blockade on the Gaza Strip since Hamas won the elections and took over power in the strip in 2007, denying the impoverished enclave’s two million population their basic rights and causing a decline in their standard of living coupled with unprecedented rates of unemployment and poverty.
Under the Oslo Accords signed in 1993, Israel is obligated to permit fishing up to 20 nautical miles, but this has never been implemented.
Israel maintains a heavy naval presence, restricting any traffic in and out of the enclave, and s the distance Gaza’s fishermen can travel to fish, severely affecting the livelihoods of some 4,000 fishermen and at least 1,500 more people involved in the fishing industry.
Israel has over the past decade launched three major onslaughts on Gaza that have heavily damaged much of the enclave’s infrastructure.
Since March 30, 2018, Gazans have been launching the weekly Great March of Return protests along Gaza’s eastern frontier with Israel, calling for lifting the 12-year blockade and demanding their right to return to their lands from which their families were expelled during the founding of Israel in 1948.
K.F.
