Israeli troops are attacking the Gaza Strip, the country’s military announced, marking an escalation in a dayslong conflict between the Israelis and Palestinian militants.
“IDF air and ground troops are currently attacking in the Gaza Strip,” the Israel Defense Forces said in a tweet sent at 12:22 a.m. on Friday local time.
It was not immediately clear how many troops were participating in the attack, and a military spokesperson denied that ground troops entered the territory.
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The operation follows days of an air war in which Palestinian militants have launched nearly 2,000 rockets from Gaza at Israel, and Israel has responded with airstrikes.
Officials in Gaza estimate more than 100 Palestinians have died, with hundreds more injured, and several people have been killed in Israel.
The violence began a month ago following clashes between Israeli police and protesters and the threatened evictions of dozens of Palestinian families. The Israeli Supreme Court announced on Sunday that a hearing on the evictions would be delayed until further notice.
Israel announced on Thursday that the military was amassing troops along the Gaza border and calling in 9,000 reservists ahead of a possible ground invasion.
“I said we would extract a very heavy price from Hamas,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a videotaped statement. “We are doing that, and we will continue to do that with heavy force.”
Hamas military spokesman Abu Obeida said the militant group is unafraid of a ground invasion, boasting such an operation would allow Hamas an opportunity to “increase our catch” of dead or captured Israeli soldiers. Hamas was designated a terrorist organization by the United States in 1997.
President Joe Biden said on Thursday that he had spoken to Netanyahu.
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“And one of the things that I have seen thus far is that there has not been a significant overreaction,” Biden said. “The question is how, how we get to a point where — they get to a point where there is a significant reduction in the attacks, particularly the rocket attacks that are indiscriminately fired into population centers.”
He called discussions on the matter a “work in progress right now.”
