An Israeli air strike injured three Islamic Jihad members in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip on Tuesday after cross-border rockets fired from the territory wounded five Israelis. One of the Islamic Jihad activists was critically wounded in the air strike near the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis, medical officials and Islamic Jihad said, according to Reuters.
An Israeli army spokesman said the air strike had targeted a single "armed Palestinian as he was preparing to launch rockets" into Israel.
Earlier, five people were wounded, one of them moderately, when Palestinian gunners in the Gaza Strip launched at least five rockets on a farming area across the border in southern Israel. "Five people were wounded, all of them in agricultural areas," an Israeli army spokesman said, according to AFP. He added that one of the rockets struck a hen house and that two of the wounded people were Bedouin.
Also on Tuesday, an Israeli soldier was moderately injured when troops clashed with Palestinian fighters in the southern Gaza Strip, the army said. Palestinian witnesses said several tanks and bulldozers rolled into southern Gaza east of the town of Khan Yunis and exchanged fire with Palestinians. The armed wing of Hamas movement said its fighters had fired on the troops and that the "Zionist enemy recognises that one of its soldiers was wounded."
Elsewhere, a Palestinian man has been killed after a cross-border smuggling tunnel collapsed, medics said on Tuesday. Forty-year-old Helmi Arbea was trying to pass through the tunnel between the Gaza Strip and Egypt when the tunnel collapsed on him.
The Gaza Health Ministry said five more people were injured in the incident and one is still missing. Security officials said the tunnel was under construction at the time.
