Israeli air strikes kill 14 in Gaza

Israeli air strikes on Gaza killed 14 Palestinians, including a militant group chief, medics said Saturday, in the deadliest flareup in more than three years.

The Israeli military said earlier the air force carried out 13 attacks on a range of targets, including the militant leader, and that militants had by midday fired at least 70 rockets and mortar rounds into southern Israel.

Local media put the number at 80.

Fourteen Palestinians were killed and at least 20 others wounded in the string of Israeli air strikes on the Gaza Strip on Friday and Saturday, Palestinian medics said.

The Palestinian barrage, which started on Friday morning, injured four people, one of them seriously, Israeli military sources said.

Israeli media said that three of the casualties, including the badly wounded man, were agricultural labourers from Thailand working on a farm near the border with Gaza.

One of the retaliatory air strikes killed the head of the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC), Zohair al-Qaisi, and fellow member Mahmud Hanani, the ultra-hardline militant group said.

The PRC threatened reprisals for Qaisi's death.

Al-Quds Brigades, the military wing of Islamic Jihad, said the air strikes also killed 10 of its members.

"Aircraft targeted two weapons manufacturing facilities and two rocket launching sites in the northern Gaza Strip, a weapons manufacturing facility in the central Gaza Strip and a terror activity site in the southern Gaza Strip," the Israeli army said.

"The targeting is in direct response to the rocket fire at Israeli communities in southern Israel," it said in a statement.

It said Israel's Iron Dome missile defence system intercepted 10 Grad rockets fired at the southern towns of Beersheva, Ashdod and Ashkelon, which have a combined population of more than half a million people.

"Aircraft targeted a terrorist in the central Gaza Strip and six additional terrorist squads who were in the final stages of preparing to fire rockets at Israel from separate locations in the northern and the central Gaza Strip," it said.

The PRC and Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed offshoot of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas's Fatah movement, said they fired rockets into Israel on Friday.

The Palestinian WAFA news agency quoted a statement by the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority condemning Israel's retaliation, saying it would "escalate the circle of violence in the region."

The Israeli military said Qaisi "was among the leaders who planned, funded and directed" a deadly cross-border attack into southern Israel from Egypt's Sinai peninsula last August.

In that attack, gunmen carried out a coordinated series of shooting ambushes on buses and cars on Route 12, which runs along the Egyptian border, 20 kilometres (12 miles) north of the Israeli Red Sea resort of Eilat.

The shootings took place over several hours, leaving eight dead and more than 25 wounded.

The army said on Saturday that it had once again closed Route 12 to traffic, "in light of situation assessments and security considerations."

The PRC militants killed on Friday night were "responsible for planning a combined terror attack that was to take place via Sinai in the coming days," according to the Israeli military.

Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, has maintained a tacit truce with Israel, but other armed Palestinian groups regularly fire rockets and mortars across the border, often sparking retaliatory air strikes.

The relatively small PRC is one of the most active.

"We are not committed to the truce; we will respond very strongly to this (Israeli) crime," Abu Ataya, a spokesman for the PRC's military wing, the Al-Nasser Salaheddin Brigades, told AFP.

Hamas also referred to the killings as a crime.

"The Al-Qassam Brigades mourn the martyr leader Zohair Qaisi and martyr Mahmud Hanani and confirm that their blood will not be wasted, the enemy's crime will be a curse on him," the group's military wing said in a statement.

"The recent Zionist escalation is an unjustified crime, it comes as a part of the destabilisation of a stable security situation in the Gaza Strip," the Hamas-run Gaza government's interior ministry said.

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