An Israeli airstrike destroyed Al-Shorouk Tower in Gaza. This is the third high-rise building to be destroyed since the escalation of violence began on May 10, 2021. It was not immediately clear if there were any casualties.
Israel faced an escalating conflict on two fronts Thursday after days of exchanging deadly fire in Gaza. Defence Minister Benny Gantz ordered a "massive reinforcement" of security forces to quell mob violence across the country, where police stations have been attacked and people savagely beaten on both sides.
Despite global alarm and diplomatic efforts to halt the spiralling violence, which US President Joe Biden said he hoped would end "sooner than later", hundreds of rockets again tore through the skies over the Gaza Strip overnight.
Israel's air force launched multiple strikes with fighter jets, targeting what it described as locations linked to Hamas that controls Gaza.
In Gaza, 83 people were reported killed since Monday -- including 17 children -- and more than 480 people wounded as heavy bombardment has rocked the crowded coastal enclave and brought down entire tower blocks. The Israeli military said it had struck Gaza targets more than 600 times, while Hamas had fired over 1,600 rockets towards Israel. Israel's civil aviation authority said it had diverted all incoming passenger flights headed for Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport to Ramon airport in the south, as air raid warnings once more went off across Israel.
In southern Israel, seven people were killed, including one six-year-old, after a rocket struck a family home, the United Hatzalah volunteer rescue service said. Recent days have seen the most intense hostilities in seven years between Israel and Gaza's armed groups, triggered by weekend unrest at Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa mosque compound.
The unrest has been driven by anger over the looming evictions of Palestinian families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of East Jerusalem. - 'Preventing pogroms' - Coinciding with the aerial bombardments is surging violence between Arabs and Jews inside Israel. Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told AFP that violence was at a nadir not seen for decades and that police were "literally preventing pogroms from taking place". Hundreds were protesting in the Arab town of Kafr Kassem in central Israel, burning tires and torching police vehicles, he said. He added that nearly 1,000 border police were called in to quell the violence and that more than 400 people had been arrested.
Israeli television Wednesday aired footage of a far-right mob beating a man they considered an Arab until he lay unconscious on his back in a street in Bat Yam, near Tel Aviv. "The victim of the lynching is seriously injured but stable," Tel Aviv's Ichilov Hospital said, without identifying him. A state of emergency has been declared in the mixed Jewish-Arab city of Lod, where an Arab resident was shot dead and a synagogue has been torched.
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