GAZA CITY // A Palestinian woman was killed on Thursday when Israeli tank shells hit her home east of Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip.
Zeina Al Amour, 54, was the first fatality in the latest escalation between Israel and Hamas, which rules Gaza.
The Israeli army claimed the tank shelling came in response to a mortar attack by Gaza militants.
It said there had been 10 incidents of Palestinian mortar and gun attacks on Israeli forces near the border since Wednesday and that it had responded with air raids and shelling.
Hamas’s armed wing, the Ezzedine Al Qassam Brigades, however, accused Israeli forces of encroaching into Gazan territory and said it was ready to respond.
“We will not permit this aggression to continue,” the group said.
The flare-up raised concerns over the fate of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that has held since the 50-day war in 2014.
In that war more than 2,251 Palestinians, mostly civilians, and 73 Israelis, mostly soldiers, were killed.
Overnight on Tuesday to Wednesday Israeli air raids hit four targets in northern Gaza. Medical sources said a raid on the Al Zeitoun district wounded four people, including three children and a 65-year-old man.
The raid hit a garage whose owner, Hasan Hasaneen, said the vehicles that caught fire were not used by security forces but only for “reconstruction works”.
The Israeli army said strikes targeted suspected tunnels under the border, the destruction of which it had previously cited as one of the main achievements of the 2014 war.
It announced that a new tunnel had been found on Thursday, after a first one was discovered in mid-April.
Army spokesman Peter Lerner said the new tunnel was about 30 metres deep.
He did not say how far into Israel the tunnel stretched nor when it was built but confirmed that the discovery was made by Israeli forces on the Gazan side of the border.
* Agence France-Presse
