GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (Dispatches) -- Israeli fighter jets struck targets in the Gaza Strip and Palestinian fighters fired rockets toward Al-Quds on Friday, further escalating the most serious confrontation in months between the occupying regime and resistance groups in the Gaza Strip.
An Israeli airstrike martyred two Palestinians in apartment building in Gaza City building in the afternoon, according to the Palestinian health ministry.
The strike sparked a fire on the seventh floor of an apartment tower. Rescuers pulled two lifeless bodies from the rubble. Neighbors crowded around the damaged building after the bombing, which bore the hallmarks of previous Israeli killings targeting Islamic Jihad commanders.
Earlier in the day, bursts of rocket fire from Gaza sent warning sirens wailing as far north as the contested capital of Al-Quds — about 48 miles (77 kilometers) from the Gaza fence — breaking a 12-hour lull that had raised hopes regional powers could soon broker a truce.
The fighting, which started on Tuesday, between the Zionist region and Islamic Jihad — the second-largest resistance movement in Gaza after Hamas — have martyred 33 Palestinians in the strip, including women and children, and a man in central Occupied Palestine.
A rocket slammed into the south Al-Quds settlement of Bat Ayin, said Josh Hasten, a spokesperson for the area. Dull thuds could be heard inside the city.
Videos showed Zionists jumping out of their cars and crouching beneath highway rails as the sirens sounded. Residents in nearby settlements reported hearing explosions and seeing black smoke rising from the hills.
“The bombing of Al-Quds sends a message,” Islamic Jihad said in a statement. “What is happening in Al-Quds is not separate from Gaza.”
The Israeli military said its warplanes struck four Islamic Jihad military posts and a mortar shell launcher across the Gaza Strip. Residents reported the strikes hit targets in open areas.
The office of Zionist prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he was conducting a security assessment to mount a further attack. “We continue,” he tweeted.
The Israeli military urged residents living within 40 kilometers (25 miles) of the Gaza boundary to remain close to bomb shelters and limit public gatherings until Saturday evening.
Sirens near Al-Quds took some back to the spring of 2021, when Hamas fired rockets toward the city during a bloody 11-day Gaza war.
At that time, the resistance movement cited a provocative far-right march through the Palestinian neighborhoods of Al-Quds as one of the reasons for its rocket barrage, along with the displacement of Palestinians from the city’s east.
Zionist authorities said they will allow the same extremist parade — meant to celebrate Israel’s occupation of East Al-Quds — to take place next Thursday.
Since Tuesday, Israeli strikes have martyred five senior Islamic Jihad figures and hit at least 215 targets in Gaza. Islamic Jihad has retaliated with nearly 900 rockets fired toward Zionist targets.
Israeli bombs and shells have destroyed 47 housing units, and damaged 19 so badly they were uninhabitable, leaving 165 Palestinians homeless, Gaza’s housing ministry reported. In addition, nearly 300 homes sustained some damage.
Palestinians on Friday surveyed the wreckage from the fighting.
“The dream that we built for our children, for our sons, has ended,” said Belal Bashir, a Palestinian living in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, whose family home was reduced to a heap of rubble in an airstrike late Thursday. He, his young daughters and two-week-old son would have been killed in the thundering explosion if they hadn’t run outside when they heard shouting, he said.
“We were shocked that our house was targeted,” he added as he pulled his children’s dolls and blankets from a gaping bomb crater.
At least 33 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have been martyred in the Israeli aggression, including six children and four women, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. Over 90 Palestinians have been wounded, the Palestinian Health Ministry reported.
The civilian deaths have drawn condemnation from the Arab and Islamic world. In its past four wars against Hamas, the Zionist regime has repeatedly faced accusations of war crimes due to the high civilian death tolls and its use of heavy weapons against the crowded enclave.
Hamas, the de facto civilian government with an army of some 30,000 in Gaza, has attempted to keep abysmal living conditions in the blockaded enclave from spiraling since the devastating 2021 war that martyred over 260 Palestinians.
Hamas officials on Friday told local media that Egypt was ramping up its diplomatic efforts to stop the fighting. But the Israeli public broadcaster Kan reported that Zionist officials had pulled out of the talks in Egypt after Islamic Jihad unleashed rockets toward Al-Quds.
Senior Islamic Jihad official Ihsan Attaya complained early Friday that the mediators “have been unable to provide us with any guarantees.” A sticking point has been Islamic Jihad’s demands that Israel cease its policy of targeted killings, Attaya said.
In Cairo, Islamic Jihad political bureau member Mohamad al-Hindi was trying to hash out the details of a possible truce. He told Palestinian media that he hoped both sides “would reach a ceasefire agreement and honor it today.” But the continuing exchange of fire hours later seemed to undermine his optimism.
This week’s battles began when the occupying regime of Israel launched, on Tuesday, simultaneous airstrikes that martyred three Islamic Jihad commanders along with some of their wives and children as they slept in their homes. The aggression followed the martyred of one of Islamic Jihad’s West Bank members, Khader Adnan, from an 87-day hunger strike while in Israeli custody.
The airstrikes and rockets have shifted the focus of long-running conflict back to Gaza after months of surging Israeli violence in the occupied West Bank under Israel’s most right-wing regime in history.
Israel has been carrying out near-nightly arrest raids in the West Bank that have killed 109 Palestinians so far this year — the highest such death toll in two decades. At least 20 people have been killed in Palestinian attacks targeting Zionists during that time.