Gaza, October 14: A Palestinian youth has been killed and four others wounded in an Israeli airstrike on Gaza’s feeding tunnels on the border with Egypt.
Israeli warplanes carried out a raid on the southern Rafah border early on Wednesday, targeting two tunnels, AFP quoted Israeli army officials as saying.
The army claimed the attack came in response to a rocket that was fired into Israel late on Tuesday and landed without causing casualties or damage.
Israeli fighter jets heavily bombed a number of tunnels in the north-west of the coastal strip late on Tuesday, injuring at least three people.
On Friday, Israel shut down all crossings into the Gaza Strip without prior notice as its F-16 aircraft pounded the tunnels in the south of the Palestinian coastal enclave.
Israel has mounted attacks on the burrows that are seen as the only means for the 1.5 million Palestinians in the beleaguered territory to break an Israeli-Egyptian blockade, sealing off the region to all but basic goods.
The siege has been in place since a coup by rival Fatah against the democratically elected Hamas government in June 2007, pushing the populated coastal sliver to verge of starvation.
The Gazans have resorted to developing a net of tunnels across the Rafah border, through which they push in food and fuel from Egypt.
The Israeli army regularly targets the feeding tubes, though, claiming the passages are used for providing arms to the Palestinian resistance fighters.
Hospital officials say more than 120 Palestinians have died in tunnel collapse incidents or have been killed by Israeli air raids on the network since mid-2007.
—–Agencies