Israel and the Palestinians battled each other for a third day on Saturday, while the Jewish state found itself facing a serious diplomatic crisis, with Egypt's recall of its ambassador from Tel Aviv. Rockets fired from Gaza wounded three Palestinian workers in southern Israel and Israeli planes attacked the coastal enclave.
"One rocket hit a house, causing damage but no casualties," Israel police spokeswoman Luba Samri told AFP. "The second fell on open ground, among sand dunes, where it wounded three people, Palestinians staying in Israel illegally, injuring two seriously and one moderately," she said. The Israeli military said that a total of 19 rockets fell in Israel on Saturday morning, but apart from the Ashdod attack there were no injuries.
Among those claiming responsibility for the rocket attacks, was the Popular Resistance Committees, a radical militant group blamed by Israel for the killing of eight Israelis near the Egyptian border on Thursday. Islamic Jihad and the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine also issued statements saying they took part in the salvo.
In Gaza City around 2,000 mourners, many waving Islamic Jihad banners and Palestinian flags and chanting "revenge, revenge on Tel Aviv" turned out for the funerals of an Islamic Jihad commander, Moataz Qouriqa, his five-year-old son Islam and his brother Munzer, killed in a strike late on Friday. The army said that in the early hours of Saturday the Israeli air force attacked several targets in the Gaza Strip.
"Aircraft targeted two terror tunnels and a weapons storage facility in the southern Gaza Strip, as well as a terror activity site in the northern Gaza Strip," a military statement said. "The terror tunnel was intended for the infiltration of terrorists into Israeli territory and for executing terror attacks against Israeli civilians and soldiers," it added.
The statement said that the raids were a response to Thursday's bloody border clashes and the flurry of rocket and mortar fire from Gaza since then. Palestinian medical officials said there were two air strikes targeting northern Gaza on Saturday that injured at least three people, one seriously, but military spokesmen could not confirm any aerial attacks during the day.