Home Front Command relaxes restrictions after ceasefire

The Home Front Command relaxed restrictions on southern Israel on Saturday night two hours after a ceasefire between the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Israel reportedly took effect.

According to the new guidelines, gatherings in open areas of more than 10 people and in buildings of more than 100 people will be banned in communities near the Gaza border from 6 a.m. to 12 p.m. Additionally, in that time period, only workplaces with a shelter nearby will be able to open and classes will only take place within shelters.

The IDF by Wednesday afternoon at 4:30 p.m. had already struck over 100 targets of terror groups in Gaza, with a primary focus on Islamic Jihad.

Already around 12:30 p.m., the IDF had initiated a widespread preemptive strike on a variety of Islamic Jihad rocket positions, including some concealed from the public eye, after seeing intelligence signs that the terror group was getting ready for a broad round of rocket attacks on Israel.

At 11:45 a.m., the IDF carried out its first attack of Wednesday on an Islamic Jihad crew that was getting ready to fire rockets near the southern Gaza city of Khan Yunis.

This incident came after a similar incident on Tuesday early evening.

A group consisting of various Palestinian armed groups in the Gaza Strip, including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), claimed responsibility for Wednesday’s rocket attacks against Israel.

The group, called the Joint Room of the Palestinian Resistance Factions, said the rockets fired at Israel from the Gaza Strip came in response to the Israeli assassination of three senior PIJ officials.

The three – Jihad al-Ghannam, Khalil al-Bahtini and Tareq Izz al-Din, were killed in Israeli airstrikes on Tuesday morning. Another 10 Palestinians, including women and children, were killed in the airstrikes.

The Israeli Air Force's David's Sling missile system successfully shot down a rocket launched from the Gaza Strip on Wednesday afternoon for the first time since its introduction to the IDF's arsenal, according to Israeli reports.

The reports indicate that the new system shot down a missile fired toward Israel's Gush Dan region.

Israel is ready to expand Operation Shield and Arrow to strike Gaza even harder, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday.

Netanyahu made the remarks in a phone call with mayors of towns in Israel’s south, as terrorists shot hundreds of rockets from Gaza to Israeli civilian centers, mostly in the South.

“We’re prepared for the possibility of broadening the campaign and for very severe blows, now and later as well,” the prime minister said.

The morning of the second day of Operation Shield and Arrow began quietly around the Gaza Strip. Communities were told to be in their shelters or near them. I drove south from Jerusalem, about an hour and a half drive.

The police and army had closed off some areas around the Gaza Strip, so traffic from Ashkelon could not drive along the border to Sderot. These areas were expected to be under direct threat and the threat extended dozens of kilometers inland. 

When I arrived on the border it was quiet. There wasn’t much traffic. However there are still industries operating around the border, so there are many people who have to use the roads. I’ve been in this area many times before during numerous conflicts over the last two decades of conflicts. Most of the landscape is fields and there were a few soldiers who had set up a checkpoint south of Ashkelon near Yad Mordechai and the turnoff to Karmia. 

I drove out toward Karmia and Zikim Beach until there were more roadblocks. Here I paused and wondered what would come next. The radio said people could leave their shelters. Israel had carried out strikes against sites in Khan Yunis and Beit Lahia. I could see smoke rising from Beit Lahia.

Red alert sirens sounded in areas close to the Gaza border and across Ashkelon early on Wednesday afternoon, as a barrage of rockets was fired into Israel for the first time since the IDF struck Palestinian Islamic Jihad targets in Gaza early on Tuesday morning.

The Sderot Municipality confirmed that nine rockets had been fired from the Gaza Strip, and that all of them had been successfully intercepted by the Iron Dome.

The Ashkelon Municipality confirmed that they were investigating the rocket launches and that, at this stage, there were no reported casualties or damages.

Red alerts sounded in Tel Aviv and across central Israel, including in Bat Yam and Holon, and the IDF confirmed rockets had been fired in the direction of the Tel Aviv area.

At least two rockets have been fired at Tel Aviv, with both reportedly both being shot down by Iron Dome.

In the more central areas of Rishon Lezion and Or Yehuda, daycares and kindergartens requested that parents pick up their children as soon as possible in light of the security situation, and the concern that the rockets would reach them as well.

A rocket did hit a kindergarten building in the Eshkol region of southern Israel on Wednesday afternoon; nobody was injured. 

Five people have so far been hospitalized at Barzilai Medical Center, three of whom were hospitalized for trauma and two who injured themselves on their way to a bomb shelter.

This is a developing story.

The IDF struck a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket crew at a Gaza rocket launch site on Wednesday afternoon, for the second time in 24 hours.

According to reports, one of the operatives was killed while at least one other was injured.

Early on Tuesday evening, the IDF had also struck a Gaza rocket crew on its way to fire on Israel, near the southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Yunis.

There were also other reports of such preemptive strikes against rocket crews on Tuesday and, while there have been some confirmed similar reports in recent years, the trend of hitting rocket crews before they fire is still a relatively new one.

Israel thwarted an attempt by a Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) terrorist cell to produce rockets and a launcher in the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank in recent weeks, Shin Bet head Ronen Bar revealed during a press conference on Tuesday evening.

Bar stressed that Tareq Ezzaldin, a spokesperson for the PIJ who was assassinated by the IDF in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday morning, had been attempting to replicate terrorist capabilities in Gaza to the West Bank and Israel.

According to Bar, Ezzaldin directly organized 20 terrorist cells that aimed to murder Israelis, including the cell that attempted to produce rockets. Ezzaldin provided the cells with knowledge and funding.

The United Nations Security Council is set to hold a closed-door emergency council session on Gaza late Wednesday afternoon in New York, in what will be its ninth meeting this year on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

It did so after Israel eliminated three Palestinian Islamic Jihad commanders in a pre-dawn aerial strike on Tuesday, in which at least 10 Palestinian civilians were also killed, including four women and four children. 

The United Arab Emirates said it had called for the meeting along with China and France in light of “concerning developments in Gaza.”

The UNSC meets monthly on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and has held four such gatherings this year, along with an additional four to deal with crises that have arisen in light of rising violence and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new government.

How will the UNSC tackle Israel's Operation Shield and Arrow?

In a letter to the UNSC Palestinian Authority’s Ambassador Riyad Mansour wrote, “We condemn this murderous aggression against the Palestinian people and call for immediate action to hold responsible the criminal perpetrators, both government and military officials of Israel, the occupying power, who are planning and implementing this endless series of systematic human rights violations.”

“We condemn this murderous aggression against the Palestinian people and call for immediate action to hold responsible the criminal perpetrators, both government and military officials of Israel, the occupying power, who are planning and implementing this endless series of systematic human rights violations.”

Riyad Mansour

Palestinian Authority envoy to the UN, Riyad Mansour. (credit: REUTERS)

The international community, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and the security council have a “duty to act” to bring to an end impurity Israel “have become so accustomed to,” he wrote. 

Israel’s Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan wrote a letter to the UNSC explaining that the surgical strike called Shield and Arrow was in response to a barrage of over 100 rockets Palestinians in Gaza had launched at Southern Israel last week.

“Israel acted in a precise and limited manner against senior military officials in the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) who were directly responsible for facilitating attacks and launching rockets and missiles against Israelis, in order to protect Israel's citizens and thwart the planned attacks,” Erdan wrote.

“In parallel, sites used to produce weapons and military compounds of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip, as well as PIJ military compounds, were targeted,” he explained.

“These sites were munitions warehouses and provided logistical infrastructure for the terrorist organization,” he added.

“The PIJ Organization uses the citizens of the Gaza Strip as human shields - they hide their rockets among the civilian population, use private houses as situation rooms and fire from dense urban areas,” Erdan wrote.

“It is a designated terrorist organization by Australia, Canada, the EU, Japan, New Zealand, the UK, US, and Israel,” he explained.

Erdan called on the UNSC to “condemn the indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israeli civilians launched from Gaza, and to support Israel in our legitimate right of self-defense.”