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News Article :-
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the nation was “at war” Saturday after Palestinian gunmen infiltrated Israel from Gaza, launching attacks on troops and civilians in the most brazen militant operation in years.
Israel responded with air and artillery strikes in Gaza, where the population was bracing for a wider campaign. By nightfall, at least 100 people had been killed in Israel, according to Zaki Heller, a spokesman for the Magen David Adom paramedic service. In Gaza, health officials said more than 230 people were killed in Israeli strikes.
The violence erupted suddenly Saturday morning — but comes after a year of rising tensions between Israel and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, which has been under a joint Israeli-Egyptian blockade since 2007. This year alone has seen a spate of deadly attacks in Israel and the Palestinian territories, an escalation that followed Netanyahu’s move to cobble together the most far-right government in Israeli history.
Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip and carried out Saturday’s attacks, said the operation was in response to the blockade, as well as recent Israeli military raids in the West Bank and violence at al-Aqsa Mosque, a disputed religious site in Jerusalem known to Jews as the Temple Mount.
“Enough is enough,” the leader of Hamas’s military wing, Mohammed Deif, said in a recorded message Saturday, the Associated Press reported. “Today the people are regaining their revolution.”
As of Sept. 19, before Saturday’s outbreak of violence, 227 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli troops or settlers this year, according to U.N. figures, with most of those deaths — 189 — occurring in the West Bank. At least 29 Israelis, mostly in the West Bank, were also killed this year as of the end of August, according to the same U.N. database.
Here are some of the major incidents that took place this year in the lead-up to the current conflict.
Just last month, Israel and Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that rules Gaza, appeared to be on the brink of war. Israeli border agents found explosive material hidden in a shipment of jeans and halted all exports from the Gaza Strip.
Hamas put its forces on high alert and held field exercises with other armed groups, including Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The drills included practice rocket launches, ambushes and the “storming” of settlements, local media in Gaza reported, in an apparent preview of the attacks launched on Saturday.
Hamas also allowed Palestinians to begin protesting again along the separation fence between Israel and Gaza, where young demonstrators have faced off against Israeli soldiers. On Sept. 13, five Palestinians were killed when they attempted to detonate an explosive at the barrier wall.
“It has been quiet, but it is beginning to boil,” Basem Naim, head of Hamas’s Political and International Relations Department, said in an interview with The W
