Israel responds to Hamas rockets with artillery, over 100 dead in 5 days in Gaza

On Thursday alone, 52 Palestinians, including 29 children, were killed in Gaza. Seven lives were lost in Israel.

Nearly 120 people have been killed and over 600 injured in ongoing clashes between the Israeli forces and Palestinian Hamas. Of the casualties, at least 109 deaths have happened in Gaza.
 

On Thursday alone, 52 Palestinians, including 29 children, were killed in Gaza. Seven lives were lost in Israel.

Israeli Defence Forces fired artillery shells and launched more airstrikes against Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip. The Hamas, on the other hand, continued to fire a barrage of rockets into central and southern Israel.
 

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel has struck close to 1,000 militant targets in the territory. Israeli military spokesman Lt Col Jonathan Conricus said ground troops were conducting operations in Gaza. However, he later clarified that Israeli troops had not entered Gaza.
 

Many foreign airlines have cancelled flights to Israel because of the ongoing conflict.

What exactly happened in Jerusalem
 

On May 10, 2021, the news of the Israeli armed forces storming into the Al Aqsa Mosque in old Jerusalem emerged. This happened ahead of a march scheduled to be led by Zionist nationalists to commemorate Israel's capture of the city's eastern half in 1967.
 

The sudden raid by the Israeli forces ended up injuring more than 300 Palestinians. This violence led Hamas -- the Islamist militant group that runs Gaza -- to fire a dozen rockets in retaliation. The Israelis then launched an airstrike in response, killing 21 Palestinians, including nine children.

What led to the attacks and the raid?
 

Discomforting tensions had started building up from mid-April itself with the start of Ramzan. Israeli police had blocked the area setting up barricades at the Damascus Gate outside the occupied Old City to keep Palestinians from gathering there. This led to an eruption of clashes forcing the police to clear the barricades, but the tensions had already risen high.

The May 7 violence
 

Situations worsened In the last week of Ramzan. Anger had set ahead of an Israeli court ruling, which was due on Monday (May 10). The court was to decide whether authorities would evict several Palestinian families from the majority-Arab East Jerusalem neighbourhood of 'Sheikh Jarrah' and give their homes to Jewish settlers. On the same day, thousands of Israeli nationalists were also supposed to lead a march through Muslim neighbourhoods in the Old City to celebrate Israel's capture of the city in 1967.
 

Clashes erupted on May 7 in Jerusalem between Palestinian protesters and Israeli police. Hundreds of Palestinians and over a dozen Israeli police personnel were injured. Though the court date was postponed and the march was rerouted by Monday, the situation had already spiralled.

The Al Aqsa raid
 

The march had to be led on May 10. But before that could happen, Israeli armed forces stormed Al-Aqsa Mosque with rubber bullets, stun grenades and tear gas to evict Palestinians. Israel said the Palestinians had camped with stones and Molotov cocktails. This was followed by rockets being launched in retaliation by Islamist militant group Hamas and airstrikes led by the Israelis.

The Sheikh Jarrah dispute
 

The story goes back to 1948, when the State of Israel was created in historical Palestine. Thousands of Palestinians were evicted from their houses, and some of these Palestinian families shifted to Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem to settle there. In 1956, when East Jerusalem was under the rule of Jordan, the Jordanian Construction ministry and the UN Relief and Works Agency built houses for these families in Sheikh Jarrah. But in 1967, Israel captured East Jerusalem from Jordan.
 

Around the 1970s, Jewish agencies started demanding the return of this land, seeking these Palestinian families to leave the settlement. Jewish committees claimed that the houses of these Palestinian families sat on the ground they purchased in 1885 (when Jews were migrating to historic Palestine that was part of the Ottoman Empire). These affairs have become one of the most vexed disputes of the world over the years.
 

Earlier this year, the Central Court in East Jerusalem upheld a decision to evict four Palestinian families residing in Sheikh Jarrah in favour of Jewish settlers. The Israeli court was scheduled to hear this dispute on May 10 when the raids happened. The hearing was postponed because of the ongoing violence in Jerusalem. The issue remains unresolved and potentially explosive.

With inputs from Prasar Bharti News Service