Is Iran Behind the Latest Round of Violence from Gaza?
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JERUSALEM, Israel – A bomb detonated against Israel Defense Forces (IDF) troops along the Israeli-Gaza security fence on Saturday sparked a flare-up of violence overnight.
The attack comes just a week after Israel shot down an Iranian drone over sovereign Israeli territory and lost an F-16 fighter jet during a counterstrike in Syria. One expert said Saturday's attack was part of Iranian attempts to open up multiple fronts against Israel.
"Basically Hamas, I would say Islamic Jihad, pro-Iranian clandestine organizations, and even some Salafi organizations, all of them would like to have a game-changer phenomenon in Gaza," said Professor Uzi Rabi, director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle East Studies and head of the Department of Middle Eastern and North African History at Tel Aviv University.
"Iran has a kind of interest to put as many fronts as they can against Israel. Gaza has always been a kind of very, very good platform for Iran, and I guess, in the aftermath of what we have seen in the North, this is just a byproduct of that," Rabi said in an interview made available to journalists by The Israel Project.
The IDF said four soldiers were injured, two of them severely in Saturday's explosion, in what's being called the worst attack since Israel launched Operation Protective Edge in 2014. The military incursion followed a huge upswing in rocket attacks on southern Israel from the Gaza Strip.
Israel responded to the attack on Saturday by striking six Hamas "terror targets" in the Gaza Strip, IDF said in a statement. The targets included "an offensive terror tunnel built by the Hamas terror organization…toward Israeli territory;" a military compound "including weapon manufacturing sites;" and another military compound.
At least one projectile launched from Gaza landed directly on a house, media reports said, but it did not explode and no one was injured. The house was damaged.
The IDF then responded by attacking more Hamas sites, including by air and tank fire at an outpost across the border. Later the IDF released a statement saying it had struck 18 targets in all, including the original six.
Hamas had reportedly organized demonstrations along the Israeli security fence earlier on Saturday. And the IDF blamed Hamas for using these demonstrations to carry out terror attacks.
"The IDF views with great severity the incident in which popular and seemingly spontaneous demonstrations were used for terrorist activity and an attempt to destabilize the Gaza Strip," the IDF's statement read.
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