Gaza terrorists fire rocket at Israel for ninth consecutive day

Terrorists in the Gaza Strip on Saturday launched a rocket into Israel, setting off sirens in the southern communities of Kibbutz Erez and Netiv HaAsara.

The rocket exploded near the Erez Crossing, not far from where humanitarian aid trucks pass into the Strip, according to the Israel Defense Forces. The impact caused some damage to the crossing.

It was the ninth rocket attack from Gaza in as many days.

Meanwhile, the Israeli Air Force struck more than 100 terrorist targets throughout Gaza over the weekend, eliminating dozens of Hamas operatives.

The targets included sites from which rockets were launched at Israel.

The IDF also struck armed terrorists on Salah Al Din Street, Gaza’s main highway. “The attack was carried out far from the movement of aid trucks, without affecting the continuity of humanitarian goods entering the Strip,” the military said.

Earlier in the day, an IDF aircraft targeted four armed Hamas terrorists in a vehicle in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, per the military.

Last week, the IDF’s Kfir Brigade alongside Yahalom, a special operations forces unit of the Israeli Combat Engineering Corps, under the command of the 162nd Division, completed an operation in the so-called “Officers’ Neighborhood” used by Hamas commanders as a hiding place and terrorist compound, the IDF stated.

The neighborhood, located in the northeast Gaza Strip, was built in the ‘90s as permanent residences for the officers of the Palestinian Authority security forces. It comprised buildings of 8-12 stories that notoriously overlooked the Israeli city of Sderot, as well as other nearby towns.

Hebrew media reported on Saturday that these high-rise buildings had been razed, along with thousands of other buildings, with the aim of establishing a security buffer zone within the Gaza Strip.

“This week, fighters of the Yahalom unit and the brigade’s engineering forces destroyed the entire complex and the terrorist infrastructure within it,” the IDF said in a statement.

In a separate incident, the IDF said that a suspect was arrested on Friday for smuggling drugs into the Gaza Strip via a drone. It was not clear if the suspect attempted to smuggle other items.

In another statement on Friday, the IDF dismissed claims that it had attacked the Indonesian Hospital in Beit Lahia over the preceding 24 hours, stressing that the military had not evacuated the hospital or interfered with its operations.