Tel Aviv - The Israel Air Force attacked what the military said was a weapons factory and two smuggling tunnels in the southern Gaza Strip before dawn Thursday, lightly injuring three people. The injured were civilians, Gaza emergency services chief Mo'aweya Hassanein said.
The airstrikes on the two tunnels in the border town of Rafah, near Egypt, and on the workshop in Khan Younis, was a response to recent rocket fire into Israel from Gaza, a military spokeswoman in Tel Aviv said.
She said Gaza militants had fired some 15 rockets and mortar shells at Israel over the past month.
Some 270 have been fired at Israel since last January's Gaza war, she said. Israel launched the offensive after some 3,300 rockets were fired from Gaza during the year leading up to it.
Since the offensive, Israel has responded to the ongoing, but sporadic fire with airstrikes, although both it and the radical Islamist Hamas movement ruling Gaza have largely observed an unspoken truce.
Some 1,400 Palestinians were killed during the three weeks of fighting, most of them civilians, human rights groups say. Thirteen Israelis were killed in rockets attacks and ground fighting during the same period.
A report commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council accuses both Israel and Hamas of having committed war crimes during and ahead of the war.
Despite Israeli diplomatic efforts to prevent the transferral of the report from the Human Rights Council in Geneva to New York, the UN General Assembly adopted its recommendations early this month.
These include prosecuting Israel and Hamas at the International Criminal Court unless the two sides launch credible investigations of their own into the allegations against their fighters.
