Gaza Rockets Hit Near Israeli City Of Beersheba As Fighting Flares
Image by Getty Images
A long-range rocket fired from Gaza struck an uninhabited area outside the largest city in southern Israel on Thursday, Israeli Army Radio reported, hours after a Palestinian official said an end to a surge in cross-border fighting could be near.
Army Radio said the rocket was a long-range Grad capable of reaching Israel’s heartland and that it hit an open area outside Beersheba.
It was a show of force and defiance by Palestinian militants ahead of a meeting of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s security cabinet, where terms for a possible truce were likely to be on the agenda.
Rocket alert sirens sounded in Beersheba, a city of 200,000 inhabitants some 40 km (25 miles) from the Gaza Strip, for the first time since the 2014 war between Israel and militants in the Palestinian enclave.
Hours earlier, a Palestinian official said armed factions in Gaza were prepared to halt a round of rocket attacks on southern Israel – where communities near the border had been targeted – if the Israeli military stopped its air strikes after two days of violence.
A pregnant Palestinian woman and her 18-month-old child, and a militant from the Islamist Hamas group that rules Gaza, were killed in the Israeli attacks, and at least five civilians were wounded, local medical officials said.
The Israeli military said seven people were wounded in southern Israel. One was identified by her employer as a Thai agricultural worker.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
