Army investigating if missile landed in Israeli territory, no reports of injuries or damage; alarms sound for second time
A rocket was launched at Israel from the Sinai region of Egypt, the Israeli military said early Tuesday morning.
There were no reports of injuries or damage, the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement.
Rocket sirens blared in the Eshkol region near the borders with the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula before 2 a.m. Tuesday morning. They went off again an hour later. There were no immediate details on the second launch.
It was not immediately clear if the first missile landed in Israeli territory, the army said.
Terrorists in Sinai affiliated with the Islamic State occasionally attack Israel, though they have mostly focused on battling Egyptian forces as part of an Islamist insurgency.
Cairo has redoubled a yearslong effort to crack down on the so-called Sinai Province of the Islamic State since a grisly attack on a mosque last month that left over 300 people dead. Israel has reportedly offered limited help in battling the insurgency.
Tensions have also been on the rise with the Gaza Strip.
On Thursday, the Islamic Jihad launched a dozen mortar shells at an army post northeast of the Strip, causing no injuries but some damage to army equipment.
The military retaliated with six strikes on terrorist positions in Gaza, four of them belonging to the Islamic Jihad and two to Hamas, which rules the coastal enclave.
On Sunday, the army declared the area surrounding the Gaza Strip a “closed military zone” in light of unspecified activities in the area.
The nature of the military activity in the area and the exact location of the closures were gagged by the military censor.
The army said there were no new special instructions for Israeli residents of the Gaza border region, though existing orders keeping farmers away from certain areas along the border remain in place.
The closures come a little over a month after the military destroyed an attack tunnel belonging to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror group, which entered Israeli territory from the Gaza city of Khan Younis.
As reported by The Times of Israel