Hamas claims responsibility for rocket attack near Kerem Shalom

Hamas said Sunday that its military wing fired rockets at Israeli forces near the Kerem Shalom border crossing between Gaza and Israel, in an attack that the Israeli military said , killed three soldiers and left three. other soldiers were seriously injured.

Approximately 14 rockets and mortars were fired from an area near the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt towards Kerem Shalom, an Israeli army spokesman, Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, said during a press briefing Sunday evening. A house on the kibbutz was hit.

Nothing indicates that the Kerem Shalom crossing itself, one of the rare crossings through which humanitarian aid can entering the Gaza Strip, , was the target of the attack, and there was no indication that other crossing points were immediately threatened, Colonel Lerner said. Yet after Sunday's attack, the army said the Kerem Shalom crossing was closed to aid trucks.

In response, said Colonel Lerner, Israeli military planes destroyed the launcher that had fired the projectiles and targeted other “Hamas military infrastructure”.

The Israeli army anticipated the possibility of rocket attacks due to its “field preparations”. near the southern border, and soldiers kept heavy tanks and bulldozers positioned in the area, Col. Lerner said.

The army had “prepositioned elements "protection" for the Israeli soldiers will take shelter and conduct an internal investigation into the circumstances of their deaths and injuries, including whether they took shelter as planned after the sirens sounded, he added.

Israel's Foreign Ministry The ministry condemned the attack and said it showed that Hamas was not not interested in aid entering the territory, parts of which a United Nations official said were experiencing "widespread famine."

The ministry said that while the army was “facilitating humanitarian aid to the population of Gaza through the Kerem Shalom crossing, terrorists were firing rockets into the same area.” »

“Israel remains committed to providing life-saving aid while Hamas remains determined to destroy lives,” the text adds.

After the attack, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel's national security minister and a far-right member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet, urged Mr. Netanyahu to authorize a long-awaited military attack against Rafah.

“We did not attack Gaza and we obtained October 7,” Mr. Ben-Gvir said in a statement published online. “We did not attack Rafah and we had a precision attack, Netanyahu, go to Rafah now!”