GAZA CITY: Israeli warplanes struck targets across Gaza, killing a child on Friday after they resumed pounding the Gaza Strip, shortly after the expiry of a 72-hour-long truce between Tel Aviv and the Palestinian resistance movement of Hamas.
Thousands of Palestinians meanwhile were fleeing their homes east of Gaza City on Friday in fear of Israeli attacks after the truce ended.
A 10-year-old boy was the first person whom Palestinian emergency services reported killed in Friday’s Israeli air strikes in the Sheikh Radwan in northern Gaza City with six others, including a woman, wounded.
The interior ministry and witnesses said warplanes struck targets in Jabaliya in the north, Gaza City and in the centre of the Palestinian enclave.
Witnesses also reported artillery shelling east and north of Gaza City.
The Palestinian resistance is also reported to have started rocket attacks on Israel. Over two dozen rockets have been fired on Israeli cities including Ashkelon, Eshkol and Kivosim. Israeli officials say most rockets have landed in open areas and there have been some interceptions.
The developments came after indirect talks in Cairo failed to extend the ceasefire. A senior Hamas official has said the group would not extend the truce because Israel had not responded to any of the Palestinian demands at the negotiations.
The Israeli regimes 29 days of military attacks against the Gaza Strip, which began on July 8, claimed the lives of nearly 1,900 Palestinians, including more than 400 children, and wounded over 9,500 others.
67 people have died on the Israeli side, almost all soldiers.
Earlier a senior Hamas official signaled that indirect negotiations in Cairo over a permanent truce in Gaza were not making headway. It was an ominous sign ahead of Friday’s expiration of a temporary three-day truce that ended a month of fighting.
A text message from Hamas’ military wing, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, warned there would be no extension of the cease-fire if there was no agreement to permanently lift the blockade enforced by Israel and Egypt since the militant group overran Gaza in 2007.
Abu Obeida, the al-Qassam spokesman, appeared on the group’s Al-Aqsa TV station and said Hamas was “ready to go to war again.” He threatened to launch a long-term war of attrition that would cripple life in Israel’s big cities and disrupt air traffic at Israel’s international airport in Tel Aviv.
He also appealed to Hamas negotiators in Egypt not to accept an extension of the cease-fire without an agreement on lifting the blockade. “The resistance is capable of imposing its conditions,” he said.
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