The Israel Defense Forces targeted Hamas weapons production sites and storage facilities in the Gaza Strip in response to rockets launched toward Israel early Thursday.
The rockets targeted southern Israeli communities in Sderot and nearby Nir Am and Ibim. The Iron Dome missile defense shot down the rocket targeting Sderot, as the first siren sounded at 2:38am local time. Another alert came 10 minutes later in Be’eri, Sirens followed throughout the night in Kfar Aza nearby.
Magen David Adom treated a woman in her 50s who fell while running to a bomb shelter in Sderot. There were no reports of other injuries, but a large piece of shrapnel caused minor damage to a road, the Sderot municipality said. An eight-month-old baby broke his hip when he fell from his older sister’s arms while she was running for shelter in Sderot during the rocket fire.
The latest friction point appeared to be over the treatment of Palestinian terrorists imprisoned in Israel, with National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir having ordered the shutdown of two bakeries inside detention facilities that supplied security inmates with fresh bread.
We know Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “right-wing” government presents an enormous threat to Israel’s enemies who continually seek to harm and delegitimize it. The government is starting to exercise its legal and sovereign rights to restore processes and operations to their rightful level of integrity in the face of threats of copycat and revenge attacks that hang overhead. Israel’s defense and security forces must be ready at every turn to combat and prevent these attacks.
While continued Iranian financed attacks continue and escalate, one must wonder why the West is pointedly focused on aid to Ukraine and is not doing more to surreptitiously assist the revolutionaries inside Iran. The overthrow of the Islamic state would greatly reduce the existential danger to Israel and the great danger to all of the Western world. We pray that this is happening in secret.
