Explosions were heard in several areas as Israel’s Iron Dome — its extensive antimissile defense system — intercepted many of the projectiles. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said more than 450 rockets had been fired by Wednesday evening.
Officials said one house in the southern city of Sderot caught fire and a kindergarten was hit in the nearby city of Beersheva. At least five people were being treated at a hospital in Ashkelon for injuries suffered while running to a shelter and emotional distress. More than a million Israelis were in shelters, the military said.
The rocket attacks followed several Israeli airstrikes inside Gaza on Wednesday, targeting what the military said were rocket-launch positions that were about to be used to attack Israel. At least one person was killed in those strikes, according to Palestinian officials.
The military escalation began with an operation early Tuesday in which 40 Israeli aircraft hit three apartment buildings across the enclave, killing three senior leaders of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and at least 12 other people. The IDF said it had struck 40 rocket and mortar launch sites since then.
In all, the Palestinian Health Ministry said 21 people have been killed and 64 injured in the Gaza Strip since Tuesday morning. It said five children and four women were among the dead. Officials reported a wave of casualties at one hospital Wednesday afternoon, including a 10-year-old girl who had been killed and 10 others who were injured.
Israelis and Gazans alike — grimly accustomed to violence that follows a pattern of attack and counterattack — had been on edge Wednesday morning after an unexpected night of calm. Some said the waiting had been harder to bear than sirens and explosions.
The latest rocket barrages were fired by Islamic Jihad, an Israeli military officer said in a briefing, a conclusion based on surveillance from aerial drones. There was no sign that Hamas, the dominant militant faction that rules Gaza, was actively participating, he said, although Israeli forces were prepared for the group to get involved.
There were reports on Egyptian state television late Wednesday of a cease-fire brokered by Cairo, but there was no confirmation from the warring sides and no letup in rocket fire from Gaza.
Both Hamas and Islamic Jihad have vowed that Israel would pay for its most recent attacks. A statement Wednesday on behalf of the “Joint Room,” an umbrella group of Gazan militant factions that includes Hamas, said the rocket attacks would reach across central Israel and include “hundreds of missiles.”
In a separate statement, Islamic Jihad said all of Gaza’s rival armed groups were united in their response.
“The response to the assassination crime comes in the context of confronting the aggression of the occupation,” Daoud Shehab, an Islamic Jihad official in Gaza, said in a statement. “It is a message to the occupation that their attempt to divide Palestinians has failed.”
Israel said it was focused Wednesday on hitting militant squads that were about to launch rockets. In one strike, using surveillance drones and attack aircraft, Israel targeted a group it said was readying a launch near the separation fence in southern Gaza. One person was killed in that attack, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.
Schools remained closed throughout Gaza and in Israel within about 25 miles of the border, with the Israeli Education Ministry activating remote-learning programs. Israeli police blocked roads in the area, and local governments were on emergency footing. Public shelters were open in the densely populated towns around Tel Aviv, where many schools also closed as rockets rained down.
Gillian Daniel, 74, from the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon, had spent hours in a safe room with her daughter’s family, seven in all.
“It’s awful every time the siren goes off,” Daniel said by phone. The retired secretary has lived in the south near Gaza for 40 years through countless repetitions of violence and no longer sees hope for peace. “We hear all the bangs when the Iron Dome system intercepts the rockets — most of them, thankfully.”
She was interrupted by loud barks. “There go two more [rocket explosions]. My dog barks every time he hears a boom.”
There are no public bomb shelters in Gaza, and residents know that Israeli strikes could land anywhere. More than 230 Gazans were killed in a two-week conflict in 2021.
“We live in a state of war without an actual war,” said Diaa Saud, 48, a carpenter waiting out the tensions in front of the Gaza City apartment where his eight children were sheltering.
“My children do not go to schools, and they ask me about what will happen. Will there be war or what?” said Reem al-Sirhi, 31. “I don’t have an answer. I’m scared, and I try not to show it to the kids.”
Israel said the three Islamic Jihad leaders killed Tuesday were responsible for several terrorist attacks inside Israel and that one was primarily responsible for a fusillade of more than 100 rockets fired into Israel last week. The blasts Tuesday killed several members of the men’s families and three people from a neighboring family, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.
Israeli officials prepared citizens for reprisals that could extend from the south to Tel Aviv, and even to the hostile northern border with Lebanon. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the nation Tuesday night, saying the military was ready to fight along more than one front.
“My directive is to be ready for the possibility of an expansion of the current campaign, and for heavy blows against Gaza,” Netanyahu added Wednesday in a video posted to Twitter.
The slow response from inside Gaza could be because the militant groups were caught off-guard by the Israeli strikes, which came less than a week after Egyptian mediators brokered a cease-fire between the parties, according to analysts on both sides. The militant groups may have been coordinating a joint response and hoping to ramp up the sense of unease among Israelis.
“The state of waiting is a situation the Gaza Strip has not witnessed before,” said Mustafa Ibrahim, a political analyst in Gaza City.
In Israel, the flare-up has allowed Netanyahu to head off growing disquiet within his governing coalition and mounting opposition from the Israeli public, said Gayil Talshir, a political scientist at Hebrew University.
“War always brings Israelis together, and certainly right-wingers,” Talshir said.
The campaign comes after months of unprecedented protests in which hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens flooded the streets to stop the government’s planned judicial overhaul, repeatedly grinding the economy to a halt and threatening to affect reservist manpower in the country’s relatively small army.
For the first time in over a decade, Netanyahu was dethroned from the top of public opinion surveys. Major Israeli TV channels showed that most citizens no longer believed him to be the best leader for the country. Even an interviewer from the right-wing Channel 14 News, Israel’s version of Fox News, called on Netanyahu last month to explain why, despite his government’s solid 64-seat parliamentary majority, “something isn’t quite working out.”
The confrontation with Gaza has also helped assuage his hard-line coalition members, including prominent far-right critics who say Israel should take advantage of its military and pulverize militant groups in Gaza. Following the pre-dawn airstrikes Tuesday, far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir announced that his party would end its week-long boycott of Knesset votes and shutter its headquarters in the southern Israeli city of Sderot, set up a week ago in protest of the government’s “weak and limp” response to rockets from Gaza.
Rubin reported from Tel Aviv and Balousha from Gaza City