KHAN YOUNIS (Dispatches) -- Hamas said Palestinian fighters captured members of an Israeli force in an ambush inside the Gaza Strip on Saturday, sparking celebration by Palestinian and Lebanese people.  
Abu Obaida, spokesman for the group’s armed wing, Al-Qassam Brigades, said resistance fighters killed, wounded or captured members of the Israeli force during fighting in Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza.
He did not say how many had been abducted and provided no further information about their identities. He said more details would follow soon. 
“Our fighters lured a Zionist force into an ambush inside a tunnel ... The fighters withdrew after they left all members of the force dead, wounded, and captured,” Abu Obaida said in a recorded message broadcast by Al Jazeera early on Sunday.
Abu Obaida’s message was followed by a video released by Al-Qassam Brigades showing fighters pulling inside a tunnel a man who appeared to be unconscious. He was pulled alongside military gear. 
The video separately showed three semi-automatic rifles and other military gear that Hamas said were taken from the captured Zionists. 
People in the occupied West Bank and Lebanon took to the streets to celebrate the operation. 
Celebrations took place at the Palestinian city of Dura in the southern West Bank, as well as the refugee camps of Ain al-Hilweh, Nahr el-Bared, el-Buss and Rashidieh in Lebanon.
Yemen’s Ansarullah resistance movement praised Hamas’s “heroic” operation. 
In a statement, the Ansarullah political bureau said the resistance fighters had made the Palestinian nation proud with their “bravery” and amazed the entire world with their “patience, steadfastness, and victories.”
“This operation is one of the heroic operations that devastates the Israeli enemy and inflicts heavy losses upon them,” it added.
“These operations come within the context of the natural and legitimate right to respond to the genocidal massacres in the Gaza Strip.”
The comments by Abu Obaida came after weeks of renewed intense close-quarter combat across the Gaza Strip in recent weeks, according to Israeli and Palestinian media. 
The Israeli military sent tanks and troops to Rafah and north Gaza in fresh attacks early in May. 
The advances have been met by some of the fiercest resistance by Hamas and other Palestinian groups, especially in the Jabalia refugee camp.
The heavy fighting has coincided with an increase in carpet bombing by Israeli jets, flattening neighborhoods in Jabalia and Rafah. 
Palestinian Health Ministry said Sunday 35,984 Palestinians have been martyred and 80,643 injured in Israeli strikes since October 7 in Gaza, after 81 Gazans were martyred over the past 24 hours.
Palestinians have killed more than 1,500 Zionists in the same period, the majority of them during the Hamas-led attack in southern occupied territories on October 7.
Later Sunday, Hamas said it launched fresh rocket attacks against the occupied territories. The resistance group fired at least eight rockets at Tel Aviv and its surroundings, where rocket sirens were sounded in other cities and towns.
The Zionist military said the rockets were launched from Rafah, claiming that several of them were intercepted.  
The Qassam Brigades said the attack “was in response to the Israeli massacres against civilians.”
Sunday’s rocket fire was the first in four months on the occupied city since Jan. 29.
Meanwhile, Lebanon’s Hezbollah fighters conducted an operation against an Israeli military outpost after the Zionist regime launched two separate deadly strikes in southern Lebanon.
Lebanon’s Al-Manar television channel said the resistance group targeted the Al-Abbad outpost in the northern part of the occupied lands on Sunday afternoon, and destroyed technical equipment there.
Hezbollah said it had shelled an Israeli military outpost and soldiers stationed in the area “in response to the assassination carried out by the Zionist enemy in the town of Naqoura and the injury of civilians.”
According to the Israeli military, a total of 15 rockets crossed the Lebanese border in the attack.
Sirens had sounded in the Israeli border communities of Betzet, Hanita, Rosh Hanikra, and Shlomi.
Earlier, a Hezbollah fighter was martyred in an Israeli drone strike on a motorcycle in southern Lebanon.
A separate strike targeted two more Hezbollah members in southern Lebanon’s Ayta ash-Shab, the military added.
The occupying regime of Israel has continued its brutal invasion of the Gaza Strip despite a UN Security Council resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire.
Nearly eight months into the Israeli war, vast swathes of Gaza lay in ruins amid a crippling blockade of food, clean water and medicine.
Israel is accused of “genocide” at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which in its latest ruling has ordered Tel Aviv to immediately halt its operation in Rafah, a city in southern Gaza where more than a million displaced Palestinians had sought refuge.