Israeli air strikes in Gaza

12 Palestinian fighters were killed and at least 20 people wounded in a series of Israeli air strikes on the Gaza Strip, Palestinian medics said on early Saturday.  The Israeli military said the air force launched 13 attacks on a range of targets, including a militant leader. The Israeli raids came as Palestinians fired dozens of rockets and mortar rounds into southern Israel starting Friday morning, injuring four people, one of them seriously, Israeli military sources said. One of the retaliatory Israeli air strikes killed the head of the Popular Resistance Committees, Zohair al-Qaisi, and fellow member Mahmud Hanani, the ultra-hardline militant group said. The PRC threatened reprisals for Qaisi’s death, and around 45 rockets and shells were subsequently fired on southern Israel. The Al-Quds Brigades, the military wing of Islamic Jihad, said that the Israeli air strikes also killed 10 of its members. The statement said that Israel’s Iron Dome missile defence system intercepted 10 Grad rockets fired at the southern Israeli towns of Beersheva, Ashdod and Ashkelon, which have a combined population of more than half a million people. “Aircraft targeted a terrorist in the central Gaza Strip and six additional terrorist squads who were in the final stages of preparing to fire rockets at Israel from separate locations in the northern and the central Gaza Strip,” it added. The PRC and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed offshoot of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas’s Fatah movement, issued statements claiming to have fired rockets into Israel on Friday. The official Palestinian WAFA news agency quoted a statement by the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority condemning the Israeli retaliation, saying it had created a “negative environment” that would “escalate the circle of violence in the region.”