Israel ramped up its military presence along the fence separating it from the blockaded Gaza Strip on Friday morning in an apparent show of force, a day after it launched deadly air strikes after a Palestinian rocket destroyed a home in southern Israel.
With Thursday’s deployment clearly visible from main Israeli roads near Gaza, senior Egyptian security officials met leaders of Hamas, the de facto ruling party of the besieged enclave, to try to calm tensions.
A Reuters photographer counted some 60 tanks and armoured personnel carriers at a deployment area near the strip, calling it the largest number he has seen there since the 2014 war between Israel and Hamas.
The deployment came as Nickolay Mladenov, the UN envoy for the Middle East, told the UN Security Council on Thursday that “we remain on the brink of another potentially devastating conflict, a conflict that nobody claims to want, but a conflict that needs much more than just words to prevent”.
Hamas on Thursday pledged to launch an investigation into the rocket fire after denying, along with Islamic Jihad, any involvement in the attack.
Israel, which killed one Palestinian and injured several others in Wednesday’s air strikes, rejected the denials.
Much may depend on the scope and intensity of a planned Palestinian protest near the fence separating the enclave from Israel on Friday, where protests in which hundreds of Palestinians have been killed have been held over the past six months.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who convened his security cabinet on Wednesday after the rocket attack, pledged to take “very strong action” if such attacks continued.
“We must land a strong blow against Hamas. That’s the only way to lower the level of violence to zero or close to zero,” Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman as saying on Tuesday, after Israeli forces shot at a group of Palestinians allegedly trying to send incendiary balloons into Israeli neighbourhoods near Gaza that morning.
He added that Israel should take a hard line “even at a price of moving to a wide-scale confrontation”.
In August, Israel carried out air strikes against sites allegedly used to make incendiary balloons and kites, and the ensuing exchange of fire between the Israeli army and armed Palestinian factions brought both sides close to war.