JERUSALEM (Reuters) – The Israeli military said a rocket launched from Gaza was intercepted on Wednesday, a day after the United States appealed to all sides to calm escalating violence in Israel and the occupied West Bank.
Israel’s ambulance service said one woman slipped and fell while running to a shelter but no damage was reported. There was no claim of responsibility from either Hamas, the Islamist group that runs the Gaza Strip, or the smaller Iran-backed Islamic Jihad movement which fired rockets at Israel last week.
But the rocket launch underlined the tensions between Israel and the Palestinians after a Palestinian gunman shot dead seven people outside a synagogue in Jerusalem and an Israeli raid in a West Bank refugee camp in which 10 Palestinians were killed.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged calm on both sides during a visit to the region on Tuesday, in which he reaffirmed Washington’s support for a two-state solution to the decades-long conflict.
In a tweet sent after the rocket launch, Israel’s hardline National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who oversees prisons, said he would push ahead with plans to toughen conditions for Palestinian prisoners.
“The rocket fire from Gaza will not stop me from continuing efforts to cancel summer camp conditions for murderous terrorists,” he said, adding that he had asked the security cabinet to convene.
Israel has been carrying out near-daily raids in the West Bank since a spate of deadly attacks by Palestinians in Israel last year, leading to a bloody January for Palestinians in which 35 were people, militants and civilians, were killed.
(Reporting by Henriette Chacar in Jerusalem and Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza; editing by Toby Chopra and Mark Heinrich)
