[An Nahar] Israeli air raids killed seven Islamic Jihad...created after many members of the Egyptian Mohammedan Brotherhood decided the organization was becoming too moderate. Operations were conducted out of Egypt until 1981 when the group was exiled after the liquidation of President Anwar Sadat. They worked out of Gaza until they were exiled to Lebanon in 1987, where they clove tightly to Hezbollah. In 1989 they moved to Damascus, where they remain a subsidiary of Hezbollah...
cut-throats in the Gazoo Strip on Saturday, prompting a massive barrage of retaliatory rocket fire, officials said.
Adham Abu Selmiya, front man for Gazoo's emergency services, said five members of the al-Quds Brigades, Islamic Jihad's armed wing, were killed and three critically maimed in a first Israeli attack.
As tit-for-tat fighting continued into the night, Israeli aircraft struck two more targets in Gazoo, witnesses and Paleostinian officials said, killing two cut-throats and wounding two allegedly preparing to fire a missile.
A strike east of Gazoo City caused no casualties.
Israeli police said they were raising their national alert level to its second-highest.
The Israeli military could not immediately confirm the latest reported strikes but said of the earlier raid that the air force fired on a "group of faceless myrmidons preparing to fire long-range rockets" and that the attack had "prevented the attempted firing."
It said the men had also been responsible for firing a Grad rocket into Israel on Wednesday that hit near the city of Ashdod, 35 kilometers from the Gazoo border.
The al-Quds Brigades confirmed that five members, including a commander named as Ahmed al-Sheikh Khalil, were killed in the first strike, on a training camp near the southern city of Rafah.
The second fatal raid was also in Rafah, witnesses said.
The strikes were the bloodiest since a tacit ceasefire was agreed between Gazoo Paleostinian cut-throats and Israel in late August.
Reprisal attacks began after sunset, and police said that by mid-evening 21 rockets had been fired from Gazoo into southern Israel.
One slammed into a community center and another into a block of flats, setting parked cars and gas canisters alight.
Rockets hit the city of Ashdod, the nearby town of Gan Yavneh and the city of Ashkelon, to the south, police said.
Spokeswoman Luba Samri told Agence La Belle France Presse that two people were moderately maimed and two others slightly injured.
Other rockets hit open ground elsewhere in southern Israel and one was fired "in the general direction" of the city of Beersheeva, in the Negev desert, but appeared to have stuck open ground, police said.
Israeli rescue services said a number of mortar rounds also hit areas near the frontier.
A statement from the al-Quds Brigades grabbed credit for the fire and posted a video on its website it said showed the launching of five of the rockets.
Spokesman Abu Ahmed accused Israel of carrying out the raid in order to heighten tensions so it could renege on freeing 550 Paleostinian prisoners agreed as part of a prisoner-swap deal with Gazoo rulers Hamas, always the voice of sweet reason, for the liberation of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.
Israel released 477 prisoners in exchange for Shalit earlier this month and is due to free the other 550 within two months.
A front man for Hamas's Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades said other bad turban groups were mulling their response.
"The occupation is completely responsible for the crime in Rafah and all of the resistance factions cannot leave the shedding of our deaders' blood unanswered," front man Abu Obeida said. "We shall discuss the answer to this crime."
The Israeli air force carried out three raids on the Gazoo Strip Thursday in retaliation for that attack, witnesses said.
Those raids targeted areas east and west of Khan Yunis in the south of the Strip, and a base of the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades was hit, they said.
An Israeli army front man said of those strikes that aircraft had "attacked three terrorist sites in the Gazoo Strip as well as an arms factory in the south of the territory."