Three Israelis were killed, the first civilians to die in clashes with Gaza since the 2014 war. Gaza health officials say 15 Palestinians have been killed since Friday.
JERUSALEM — Fighting between Israel and Gaza escalated rapidly on Sunday in the worst combat since the last full-blown war in 2014. Three Israeli civilians were killed in Palestinian rocket and missile attacks and Israeli forces began to take aim at individual Gaza militants, killing at least seven.
The three Israelis killed were the first civilians to die in clashes with Gaza since the two sides fought a brief war in the summer of 2014. Gaza health officials said 15 people had been killed since Friday, though Israel denied responsibility for two of those deaths.
One Palestinian rocket struck an Israeli cement factory in the southern city of Ashkelon, killing a Bedouin worker there. A woman was killed near Or Haner, a tiny kibbutz two miles from the Gaza border, when the truck she was driving in was hit by an anti-tank missile fired from Gaza. A third Israeli was killed in the early morning when he left his safe room for a cigarette break, his brother said.
Israel responded first by destroying what it said were the homes of several Palestinian militant commanders and then by following through on a longstanding threat — one heard more frequently in recent days from hawkish politicians — to start killing individual fighters in targeted attacks.
An airstrike that destroyed a car in Gaza City killed a man who the Israeli military said had been responsible for large transfers of cash from Iran to Hamas, the militant Islamic group that rules the territory, and to a rival faction in Gaza, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Israel said the man, Ahmad Hamed Al-Khudary, 34, owned a money exchange company that it designated a terrorist organization last June.
Asked why Israel had resumed its long-dormant tactic of assassination, Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, a military spokesman, said, “It’s important for Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad to understand the severity of the situation.”
Two other fighters with Palestinian Islamic Jihad were killed in an airstrike on the Al Buraij refugee camp early Sunday, the group said.
The attacks from Gaza mostly hit targets in southern Israel with no military value, including a building housing a kindergarten in the town of Sderot and the oncology department at Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon. An army post in the community of Kissufim was hit by a mortar that struck its synagogue, lightly wounding two soldiers.
More than 100 Israelis were treated at Barzilai for injuries in the day’s attacks, hospital officials said.
With rockets and mortars setting off sirens across southern Israel every few minutes — a two-day total of 600 launches, the army said — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered what he called “massive strikes,” and the military used tanks, artillery, jets, attack helicopters and drones.
