{{An air strike by Israeli forces killed three Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip on Friday, Hamas has said. The Israeli military said the planes were targeting tunnels used by Hamas to carry out attacks on Israel.}}
An Israeli air strike killed three Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip on Friday, the enclave’s Hamas rulers said, the most killed in an incident on the frontier in months.
The Israeli military said in a statement its aircraft targeted a tunnel used by Palestinian militants to carry out attacks on Israelis and accused Hamas of breaching a ceasefire reached a year ago, after an eight-day cross-border war.
Another Palestinian militant was killed in a clash with Israeli forces on Thursday, which also saw five Israeli soldiers wounded.
Fighting broke out when an explosive device went off as troops were clearing a different Gaza tunnel, said the Israeli military.
Hamas’ military wing Ezzedine al-Qassam said in October that it had dug the tunnel as part of a plan to kidnap Israeli soldiers and hold them in exchange for Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.
“This mission was imperative due to the potential to utilise the terror tunnel for future attacks against Israeli civilians,” the Israeli military said in a statement.
The Israel-Gaza frontier had been mostly quiet for the past year after the Jewish state and Islamist Hamas ended a brief war last November with an Egyptian-brokered truce.
On Monday, Gaza militants fired two rockets at a southern Israeli coastal city, and Israel bombed what it said were two concealed rocket launchers in northern Gaza. There were no casualties in that incident.
(FRANCE 24 with wires)
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