30 May 2018
Israel strikes Gaza after heaviest mortar barrage in years
By BBC
The Israeli army said air strikes hit 35 targets, including a cross-border tunnel, belonging to Hamas and Islamic Jihad - Gaza's main militant groups.
In Israel, an empty kindergarten was hit when militants fired more than 30 mortars earlier in the day.
The flare-up follows weeks of deadly violence on the Gaza-Israel border.
More than 100 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli snipers amid protests which saw thousands of Palestinians mass on the border in support of the declared right of Palestinian refugees to return to their ancestral homes in what is now Israel.
Israel said its snipers had opened fire on attackers or people attempting to infiltrate under cover of protests, but UN and human right officials have accused Israel of using disproportionate force.
Israeli fighter jets struck seven sites across the Gaza Strip, hitting what the Israeli military said were "six military compounds, munition storage warehouses, naval targets, and terror headquarters".
Israeli Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman said: "Hamas and Islamic Jihad have already paid a heavy price and the bill has just been presented to them."
Gaza's Hamas-run Ministry of Education said a school was hit by shrapnel from Tuesday's air strikes, though there were no initial reports of Palestinian casualties.
The Israeli military said its air force also struck "an offensive Hamas terror tunnel" near the Kerem Shalom crossing, where controlled amounts of food, fuel and goods are transferred into Gaza.
It said the tunnel stretched for 900m (3,000ft) under Israeli territory. It is the latest in a series of cross-border tunnels which Israel has destroyed or disabled since the end of the 2014 Israel-Gaza war.
During that conflict, Israel destroyed more than 30 tunnels which it said were meant for attacks.
The Kerem Shalom crossing is a lifeline for Gaza, which has been under an Israeli, then Egyptian, blockade beginning in 2006 when Hamas militants attacked the crossing and kidnapped an Israeli soldier.
The blockade was tightened after Hamas, an Islamist group which won Palestinian elections in 2006, forcibly ousted its secular Fatah rivals from Gaza in June 2007.
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