Hamas man killed, 3 injured in Gaza blast

A Hamas operative was killed and at least three members of the terrorist group were injured Thursday in an explosion near Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip.

The four were reportedly taking part in a military exercise near the Egyptian border.

According to unconfirmed reports in Palestinian media, the explosion was set off by a “suspicious object” left behind during the 50-day conflict this summer between Israel and Hamas and other Gaza-based terror groups in and around the Palestinian enclave.

The Palestinian news agency Shehab identified the fatality as Bilal Abdel Moneim al-Mnerwai, 20, a member of Hamas’s military wing.

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Israel launched Operation Protective Edge on July 8 to stop Hamas and other groups’ indiscriminate rocket fire on Israeli cities and to destroy a network of attack tunnels that crossed into Israeli territory. More than 4,500 rockets and other projectiles were fired into Israel during the 50-day conflict

During the operation, Hamas rejected a number of ceasefire proposals and violated a number of those that were agreed to.

Israel lost 66 soldiers and seven civilians in the month-long conflict, while the Palestinian death toll surpassed 2,100, according to Hamas officials in Gaza. Israel said half of the Gaza dead were gunmen and blamed Hamas for all civilian deaths because it operated against Israel from residential areas, placing Gazans in harm’s way.

Founded in 1987 shortly after the start of the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, Hamas was inspired by Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. The Palestinian group’s charter calls for the destruction of Israel and the establishment of an Islamic state throughout the British Palestine Mandate area.

Earlier this week, a European Union court ordered the removal of Hamas from its terror blacklist. The General Court of the EU ruled Wednesday that the original listing of Hamas as a terror group in 2001 was based not on sound legal judgment but on conclusions derived from the media and the Internet.

But it stressed that the decision was based on technical grounds and does “not imply any substantive assessment of the question of the classification of Hamas as a terrorist group.”