Palestinians fire missiles at Israeli settlement after attacks on female prisoners

Palestinian resistance groups have fired missiles from the besieged Gaza Strip at nearby Israeli settlements in retaliation for the Israeli army escalations in the occupied West Bank, especially attacks on female prisoners.

Israeli media outlets quoted an army spokesman as saying that the Iron Dome missile defence system had intercepted a missile fired on Wednesday evening from the Gaza Strip towards the Sderot settlement near Gaza’s northern border. Sderot is built on land belonging to the Palestinian village of Najd, whose residents were ethnically cleansed by Jewish militias in May 1948.

According to Israeli Army Radio, a 50-year-old Israeli woman stumbled on her way to an air raid shelter in Sderot after the alarm went off.

Amid rising tension, the far-right Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir called for an emergency meeting of the mini-security cabinet in response to the missiles. He vowed to continue cracking down on Palestinian prisoners.

Earlier this week, the Israel Prison Service attacked female Palestinian prisoners. A leaked recording contains their appeal for help from the Palestinian resistance groups. The factions in Gaza warned that they would not leave the prisoners to stand alone, and that attacks on them “will not go unpunished”.

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