An Israeli tank takes a position at the Gaza Strip border. 27 October, 2018. (Photo Credit: Tsafrir Abayov/AP)
Israeli occupation tanks launched an artillery attack against several positions in the occupied Gaza Strip on 29 December, injuring at least three Palestinian farmers.
According to Hebrew media, the attack was launched against several Hamas observation points in the southeast of Gaza City, as well as north of the town of Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip.
The artillery shells also landed near the town of Beit Hanoun and Kissufim, north of Khan Younes.
The attack reportedly came in response to the shooting of an Israeli military contractor doing maintenance work on Israel’s boundary fence with the occupied Gaza Strip.
Israeli media reported that “an Israeli was wounded by a Palestinian sniper’s bullet on the border with Nahal Oz, east of Gaza.”
The violence erupted just hours after the President of the Palestinian Authority (PA), Mahmoud Abbas, visited Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz in his home in Tel Aviv.
This marked the western-backed Palestinian leader’s first such visit to Israel in more than a decade.
Following the talks, the Israeli defense ministry announced a series of so-called “confidence-building measures” that would “ease the entry of hundreds of Palestinian business people to Israel.”
However, Palestinian resistance factions were quick to condemn visit of Abbas to the home of Gantz, saying the move would “deepen Palestinian political divisions.”
“This meeting coincided with the settlers’ attack on our people in the West Bank, which increases the severity of the PA leadership’s crime, and constitutes a [blow] at the intifada in the occupied West Bank,” the spokesperson for Palestinian resistance movement Hamas, Hazem Qassem, said via Twitter.
لقاء رئيس السلطة محمود عباس مع وزير الحرب الصهيوني بيني غانتس، مستنكر ومرفوض من الكل الوطني، وشاذ عن الروح الوطنية عند شعبنا الفلسطيني.
تزامن هذا اللقاء مع هجمة المستوطنين على أهلنا في الضفة الغربية، يزيد من فداحة جريمة قيادة السلطة، وتشكل طعنة للانتفاضة في الضفة المحتلة.
— حازم قاسم (@hazemaq) December 28, 2021
The Media Office of the Resistance Committees in Palestine issued a statement condemning the meeting, describing it as a “national crime and an insult to the blood of the martyrs and the torment of our prisoners in the prisons of the Zionist enemy.”