GAZA STRIP (Dispatches) – Palestinian resistance group Hamas said on Sunday that the Zionist regime is escalating the situation in the Gaza Strip in an effort to evade its internal crises, reported Anadolu Agency.
Zionist regime warplanes carried out overnight airstrikes in the Gaza Strip after retaliatory rocket fire from the Palestinian territory. No injuries were reported.
“The (military) escalation in Gaza is an attempt by Israel to export its domestic crises…particularly after the collapse of its security system in the wake of the jailbreak from Gilboa prison,” Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said in a statement.
On Monday, six Palestinian inmates tunneled out of the high-security Gilboa prison in northern parts of the occupied territories. Zionist troops, however, have managed to capture four of them after a manhunt.
Gaza fighters allegedly fired a rocket into occupied territories on Friday when two of the prisoners were apprehended and then again on Saturday, after two more escaped inmates were caught.
The occupying regime’s helicopter gunships also attacked a site west of Khan Yunis city in the southern Gaza Strip. Moreover, warplanes bombed a site on the coastal road west of Rafah.
Palestinian sources in Gaza said the overnight strikes damaged homes and other buildings in the targeted areas. There were no immediate reports of casualties.
The regime’s military, for its part, claimed in a statement that its aircraft targeted an underground rocket production workshop belonging to Hamas resistance movement, as well as a weapons storage site, a training facility, and a tunnel.
The Gaza Strip has been under a Zionist blockade since 2007 when Hamas took control of the coastal enclave.
The siege has inflicted severe hardship on residents. The poverty rate among Gaza’s population has reached 53 percent, while “extreme poverty” stands at 33.8 percent, according to statistics by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS).
About 68 percent of families do not have enough to eat, while 80 percent of Gazans are dependent on aid.
The area’s unemployment rate stands at 45.1 percent, according to PCBS.