Gaza/Jerusalem - Six Palestinian militants
were killed on Monday when Israel blew up what it said was a
tunnel being dug across the Gaza Strip border.
A source for the Islamic Jihad militant group said Arafat
Abu Marshould, head of the faction's armed wing in central Gaza,
was killed along with a senior associate and two other gunmen.
The group said it had put its fighters on "full alert."
The armed wing of the Islamist Hamas group said two of its
gunmen were killed while trying to rescue Islamic Jihad men
working in the tunnel. Gaza health officials said nine people
were wounded.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in remarks to
legislators of his right-wing Likud party, said "groundbreaking
technology" aided the tunnel's discovery, but gave no details.
Israel has been constructing a sensor-equipped underground
wall along the 60-km (36-mile) Gaza border, aiming to complete
the $1.1 billion project by mid-2019.
During the last Gaza war in 2014, Hamas fighters used dozens
of tunnels to blindside Israel's superior forces and threaten
civilian communities near the frontier, a counterpoint to the
Iron Dome anti-missile system that largely protected the
country's heartland from militant rocket barrages.
Lieutenant-Colonel Jonathan Conricus, an Israeli military
spokesman, said the tunnel destroyed on Monday was in the
process of being dug from the Gaza town of Khan Younis across
the border, where it was blown up.
Asked by reporters if Hamas, rather than another armed
faction, had dug it, Conricus said: "I cannot confirm that."
"The IDF (Israel Defence Forces) does not intend to escalate
the situation but stands prepared for a variety of scenarios,"
Conricus said. "The working assumption is that this is not the
only tunnel that Palestinian terrorist organisations are trying
to dig."
"We see Hamas as being responsible for any attempt emanating
from its territory, and carried out by people who are under its
authority, to impinge on our sovereignty," Netanyahu told the
Likud lawmakers, stopping short of accusing Hamas directly of
digging the tunnel.
Islamic Jihad spokesman Daoud Shehab in a statement said
Israel's bombing of "a tunnel of the resistance is a terrorist
aggression" and Palestinian resistance factions retained the
right to respond "at the suitable time".
Hamas reached a reconciliation deal with Western-backed
President Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian Authority earlier this
month, a decade after Hamas seized the Gaza Strip in a brief
civil war.
Israel and the United States have called for Hamas to be
disarmed as part of the pact so Israeli peace efforts with
Abbas, which collapsed in 2014, could proceed. Hamas has
rejected the demand.
On Saturday, UNRWA, the main U.N. welfare agency for
Palestinians said it had discovered "what appeared to be a
tunnel" underneath one of its schools in Gaza on October 15 and had
sealed the cavity.