Israeli Defence Force soldier. Photograoh courtesy of the IDF
The Israeli military rhetoric may be focused on a threat from Iran, but in recent days the Israeli army has fired tank shells in response to shots fired in the Israeli-held Golan Heights and launched an airstrike in Gaza.
The spill over from the increasingly bloody Syrian civil war on Israel’s border has resulted in Israel firing back twice in the last two weeks. Most recently they responded with with tank shells after shots were fired at an Israeli Army jeep and a previous mortar crashing into an open field over the UN-monitored Israeli-Syrian ceasefire line.
Israel’s defence minister, Moshe Yaalon, has said that Israel will not intervene in the internal Syrian civil war as long as its own interests were not being harmed, but would fire back at any attacks on its personnel or territory.
Alongside the increased vigilance on the Syrian border in the north, Israel launched an airstrike on the Palestinian Gaza strip last night, the first attack since the eight-day war in November which ended with an Egyptian-mediated truce. The Isreali strike on “an open area in northern Gaza” resulted in no casualties and came after three rockets were fired from Gaza earlier in teh day, two landing within Gaza and one hitting an open area in southern Israel which also caused no injuries. No Palestinian group has claimed responsibility for the rockets.
