5 killed in Israeli strikes on Gaza

An Israeli air strike on a car in Gaza City killed four people on Tuesday, medics said, taking the death toll for the day to five from Israel’s air campaign.

“Four people were killed in a Zionist strike on a civilian car in the Daraj neighbourhood in the centre of Gaza City,” emergency services spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra told AFP.

There was no immediate confirmation whether the victims were civilians or militants, and Hamas-run Al-Aqsa TV showed gruesome images of charred body parts being loaded onto ambulance stretchers.

It came shortly after an Israeli air strike killed a Palestinian man in central Gaza.

Witnesses said the man was a militant of the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of the Islamist Hamas movement.

Earlier on Tuesday, the Israeli military announced the start of a new campaign called Operation Protective Edge aimed at stamping out rocket fire on southern Israel and destroying Hamas’s military infrastructure.

Overnight, the air force and the navy struck more than 50 targets across Gaza, with the raids continuing into the morning.

So far, 48 Palestinians have been wounded, four of them seriously, medics said.

It was the most serious flare-up in and around the territory since November 2012 and came as Israel struggled to contain a wave of violence in Arab towns over the grisly murder of a Palestinian teenager by Jewish extremists.