DAMASCUS (AFP) — Gaza’s civil defense agency said that Israeli air strikes in Gaza killed at least 15 people early on Thursday while a separate attack in Syria killed nine gunmen.
Israeli troops conducted a raid in the south of Gaza in response to fire from militants, the local government and a war monitor said.
The shelling came after an “Israeli incursion,” with “the occupation forces advancing for the first time to this depth,” the local government said in a statement posted to Telegram.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the Syrians were local gunmen who were killed “while attempting to confront Israeli forces, following calls by the mosques in the area for jihad against the Israeli incursion.”
According to the Israeli military, its forces were conducting operations in the Tasil area, near Nawa, “seizing weapons and destroying terrorist infrastructure” when “several gunmen fired at our forces.”
They “responded by firing at them and eliminated several armed terrorists from the ground and from the air,” a spokesperson said. There were no Israeli casualties.
“The IDF (military) will not allow the existence of a military threat in Syria and will act against it,” the spokesperson added.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demanded in February that southern Syria be completely demilitarized and said his government would not accept the presence of the forces of the new Islamist-led government near Israeli territory.
In December, as rebels were overthrowing president Bashar al-Assad in Damascus, Netanyahu ordered Israeli troops to enter the United Nations-patrolled buffer zone between the Israeli-occupied and Syrian-controlled Golan Heights, where they remain.
Israel has also conducted hundreds of air strikes on its neighbor since late last year, mostly targeting military sites and weapons systems.
On Wednesday, Israel hit targets across Syria including in the Damascus area.
Meanwhile, Gaza’s civil defense agency spokesperson Mahmud Bassal said that the strikes targeted several homes in Gaza City’s Shujaiya neighborhood.
“There are still a number of people trapped under the rubble,” he said.
The Israeli military issued a new evacuation order for residents of Shujaiya and some other districts in the Gaza’s north.
“The IDF (military) is operating with great force in your areas to destroy the terrorist infrastructure,” military spokesperson Avichay Adraee said in a post on X.
“You must evacuate these areas immediately and move to the known shelters in western Gaza City.”
In Cairo, Eypt, Hamas has rejected the latest Israeli proposal on a ceasefire, two officials from the Palestinian resistance movement told Agence France-Presse on Wednesday.
“Hamas has decided not to follow up on the latest Israeli proposal presented through the mediators” said one of the officials, speaking on condition of anonymity.
They accused Israel of “blocking a proposal from Egypt and Qatar and trying to derail any agreement.”
Confirming the Islamist Palestinian movement’s refusal to negotiate based on the latest Israeli proposal, the second Hamas official called on “the mediators and the international community to force (Israel) to commit to the mediators’ proposal.”
After two months of truce in Gaza and several weeks of unsuccessful negotiations to extend it, Israel resumed its bombings and military offensive in Gaza on 18 March, claiming that military pressure was the only way to force Hamas to release the roughly 60 hostages, dead or alive, it still holds.