The Israel Defense Forces said it launched a wave of airstrikes against Hamas targets across Gaza on Wednesday after terror operatives opened fire on troops earlier in the day in the enclave’s southern Khan Younis area.

The military said that no soldiers were wounded in the attack. The gunfire took place in IDF-held territory, on the eastern side of the Yellow Line that, since the onset of the truce, has split the Gaza Strip between Israeli and Hamas control.

The Israel Defense Forces said the shooting was a violation of the nearly six-week-old ceasefire in the Strip. The clash was the latest incident to test the truce, which has so far held despite several bouts of conflict.

Since the ceasefire deal took effect on October 10, IDF troops have remained in control of slightly more than half of Gaza, with the rest under de-facto Hamas control, as US-backed efforts to disarm the terror group and install a multinational peacekeeping force slowly proceed.

The IDF has said it remains deployed in Gaza “in accordance with the ceasefire agreement and will continue to operate to remove any immediate threat.”

Palestinian medics and Hamas-linked authorities reported that 25 people were killed by the Israeli airstrikes, split between the Gaza City neighborhood of Zeitoun in the north and around Khan Younis in the south. The figure did not differentiate between combatants and civilians.

The strike in Zeitoun hit a building belonging to Muslim religious authorities, and the Khan Younis attack was on a UN-run club, both of which house displaced families, according to Hamas authorities.

The IDF strikes had targeted senior Hamas field commanders, according to military sources.

Israeli defense officials were assessing on Wednesday whether the commander of Hamas’s Zeitoun Battalion in Gaza City, and the chief of the terror group’s naval forces, were killed in the strikes.

Hamas denounced the strikes as a “dangerous escalation,” warning they jeopardized a fragile ceasefire.

“We consider this a dangerous escalation through which the war criminal [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu seeks to resume the genocide against our people,”........

© The Times of Israel