Ya’alon: Ongoing Gaza strikes will elicit severe Israeli response

Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon on Monday blamed recent Palestinian mortar and rocket attacks and rising tensions on Israel’s border with Gaza on successful IDF steps to locate tunnels that the Hamas terror group has dug into Israeli territory. He also cautioned that Israel would not ignore ongoing attacks.

“In the last few days, we’ve seen various attempts from Gaza to disturb our lives and threaten us,” he said at a memorial ceremony in Tel Aviv to honor Defense Ministry personnel killed in the line of duty.

The attacks are “a result of Israel having developed the ability to detect tunnels, an advanced technology that the Defense Ministry and its workers have been involved in developing and using in recent days,” he added, according to a Defense Ministry transcript.

Ya’alon warned that if the shooting does not stop, Israel would respond forcefully against Hamas.

“Against this terror stands the IDF and various security agencies who are responding decisively to the shooting from the Strip — shooting that, if it continues, will lead to a more severe response for Hamas and other terror organizations in the Strip, until they understand it’s not wise to test us.”

Hamas has intermittently exchanged fire with Israeli troops as they worked to destroy tunnels inside Gaza in the past week, but the group has also conveyed to Israel through Egypt that it does not seek an escalation, Israeli officials said.

At least 20 mortar shells were fired at Israeli territory from Gaza, while Israeli Air Force fighter jets struck Hamas targets multiple times last week and over the weekend.

One rocket fired from Gaza landed in an open area in the Eshkol regional council late Friday. A second fell close to the border fence. Neither caused any injuries or damage, but sent residents dashing to their air-raid shelters as missile defense sirens sounded.

Hamas security sources said an IAF raid hit two brickworks in the southern city of Khan Younis, causing damage but no casualties. But witnesses said two missiles hit a base belonging to Hamas’s military wing east of the city, causing significant damage.

On Saturday, Israeli officials told Channel 10 News that operations to uncover and destroy cross-border attack tunnels in Gaza would continue despite the violence. They added that Hamas’s tunnel infrastructure was far from the robust network the group possessed before the 2014 Gaza war, and included only a small number of tunnels.

Two rockets fired from the Palestinian enclave early Saturday morning were not thought to have been launched by Hamas, but by a smaller terror group seeking to destabilize the region. Hamas, Israel said, was not seeking to widen the conflict to attacks on civilians, and limiting its fire to troops operating inside Gaza.

Israeli farmers who were barred last week from their fields that lie within a kilometer from the Strip, for fear of Gazan sniper fire, were allowed to return Sunday to work in the fields.

Palestinian media reports on Friday afternoon said Israel and Hamas reached a truce agreement, brokered by Egypt, which would go into effect immediately. But the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, Maj. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, stressed that no such agreement had been reached.

“The army intends to maintain its activities against Hamas as [the group] continues to breach Israeli sovereignty and build tunnels,” he said.

Despite the increased tension along the border with Gaza in recent weeks, the years since the 2014 conflict, known as Operation Protective Edge, have been the quietest in over a decade in terms of rocket fire and attacks coming from the coastal enclave.