The IDF Spokesperson reported that overnight Saturday IDF fighter jets attacked a wide range of terrorist targets inside the Gaza Strip, including a military compound of the Hamas terrorist naval force, a military compound of the organization’s air defense system, a military compound containing an anti-missile firing simulator, training compounds, a weapons production site, a military compound which is being used as a weapons warehouse, and underground infrastructure of the Hamas in the northern, central and southern Gaza Strip.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held security consultations through the night in a Tel Aviv with the Chief of Staff, the Shin Bet Chief, the Chief of the National Security Council, and IDF senior officials.
The attack was carried out in response to the launch of ten rockets from the Gaza Strip at the town of Sderot in Israel, population 26,500, earlier on Friday night. The Iron Dome system intercepted eight of the rockets, another rocket fell in an open area, and one rocket blew up near a home in Sderot.
תיעוד רגע פגיעת הרקטה בבית בשדרות pic.twitter.com/DAj7bwr6ua
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The occupants of the home, a couple in their 40s and their children, stayed in their bomb shelter room and were not harmed. Substantial damage was done to the house and adjacent cars.
At around 2:00 AM, a “red paint” alarm sounded again in Sderot and the settlement of Ibim, near Sderot, population 227. The IDF spokesperson said that time it was non-rocket fire from the Gaza Strip, directed at Israel.
As a result of the multiple terrorist attacks, a 65-year-old woman was slightly injured when she fell on her way to the bomb shelter. Five more people suffered anxiety attacks.
The Home Front Command did not issue any special instructions, but the Sderot Municipality recommended that residents stay close to protected areas.
A mass funeral was held in Gaza on Saturday for a 27-year-old man who was killed from a shrapnel in one of the IDF attacks in the Khan Yunis area of the southern Gaza Strip. His home was located near a post belonging to one of the Gaza terror groups. Two more Gazans were moderately injured in the assaults.
Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhum said on Saturday morning that the IDF attacks in the Gaza Strip are “a dangerous escalation against innocent civilians and the Zionist enemy is responsible for the consequences.”
In an astonishing level of inability to differentiate between cause and effect, Barhum added that “killing the innocent and blasting the situation with the ‘resistance’ will return as a boomerang into the face of the ‘occupation.'”
“The blood of our people is precious and no one will allow the enemy to play with it,” he said.