The Palestinian resistance movement Hamas has struck the coastal city of Tel Aviv in the occupied Palestinian territories with a barrage of rockets on the first anniversary of Palestinian fighters’ historic Operation al-Aqsa Storm against the territories.
Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the Gaza Strip-based movement’s military wing, announced carrying out the retaliatory strike on Monday.
The group said it had “bombards the city of Tel Aviv deep inside the occupation with a barrage of Maqadma M90 rockets as part of the ongoing battle of attrition and in response to the Zionist massacres against civilians and the deliberate displacement of our people.”
The projectiles made impact in Tel Aviv’s suburbs, while setting off sirens across the city and its surroundings.
Footage recorded in the strike’s aftermath showed extensive damage to buildings in the suburban area.
Israeli media outlets specified two of the strike’s targets as Holon, the regime’s second-largest industrial zone after Haifa, and the vicinity of the Ben Gurion airport, 20 kilometers (12 miles) to the southeast of Tel Aviv, where two illegal settlers were injured as a result of the retaliation.
The strike has imposed a shutdown on the terminal, and prompted a state of full alert across the occupied territories, they added.
According to the outlets, the Israeli military’s failure to prevent the strike pointed to Hamas’s continued control over the situation in Gaza.
This is while the regime has vowed to “destroy” the movement, which, according to the regime’s Israel Hayom daily, still has dozens of long-range rockets at its disposal.
Hebrew-language sources, meanwhile, said the military was not in possession of any “prior intelligence” indicating the prospect of the strike.
Earlier too, the brigades had announced launching an extensive retaliation against Israeli military targets across the occupied territories, using 114mm Rajum rockets.
It identified the targets as the military base near Sufa in the northwestern Negev desert, enemy gatherings at Gaza’s Rafah crossing, the vicinity of the Holit illegal settlement near the coastal sliver, and the operations center of the Kerem Shalom military site.
Before carrying out the retaliation, the brigades released a statement hailing al-Aqsa Storm, which was carried out by its members and their fellow fighters from al-Quds Brigades, the military wing of the Islamic Jihad resistance movement.
The operation that came in response to the Israeli regime’s intensified aggression against Palestinians saw the fighters storming the occupied territories, taking control of Israeli military bases and illegal settlements around Gaza, and taking more than 240 Israelis captive.
The Israeli regime brought Gaza under a genocidal following the operation. The war has so far claimed the lives of nearly 42,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children.
Hamas has, however, asserted that the operation had already served to shatter the regime’s “perceived military superiority,” and that the regime has not been and would not be able to realize its objectives through force.