The military says sirens wailed in southern Israel early Saturday warning of an incoming rocket.
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Locals told Ma’an Israeli forces deployed east of Khan Yunis opened fire on farmers, preventing them from reaching their lands.
Since the clashes broke out, Hamas and other militant groups have fired at least 10 mortar rounds across the frontier, and the Israeli air force has carried out four strikes on Gaza.
The Israeli army, for its part, said that warplanes targeted four Hamas military posts in the southern Gaza Strip in response to the ongoing attacks against Israeli forces.
The recent round of violence comes nearly two years after Israel’s devastating 50-day war on Gaza in summer 2014 that killed more than 2,500 Palestinians.
Israel and Hamas have said they want to maintain the truce that ended 50 days of war in the summer of 2014.
“Hamas, for its own reasons, is not interested in entering into another confrontation with Israel at this stage”, he continued.
It says this prompted return fire from Israeli tanks.
Since then Israel has invested huge resources into combatting the tunnel threat and last month Mr Netanyahu announced “a special technological breakthrough” that enables Israel to locate tunnels and potentially neutralise Hamas’s most important strategic weapon.
The conflict left at least 2,251 Palestinians dead – including more than 1,462 civilians, according to the United Nations – and 11,231 injured.
Israeli longstanding restrictions on the movement of people and goods to and from the coastal enclave have undermined the living conditions of 1.8 million Palestinians in Gaza.
“We will spare no resources and means in providing security to the residents of the area adjacent to the Gaza Strip”, he said.
An additional reason for the quiet is the fact that the IDF finished its work on the recently uncovered Gaza tunnel in the 100 meters adjacent to the border fence inside the Gaza Strip and left the area.
The IDF did the correct thing on Thursday by declaring areas near Gaza with suspected tunnels as “closed military zones”, amid concern that Hamas has already infiltrated into Israeli territory, even as training exercises.
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Destruction of the tunnels became one of Israel’s primary goals during the 2014 war, with more than 30 destroyed, according to the army. Lerner confirmed IDF forces had been fired on, saying that in the last 24 hours, we have had at least six incidents where Hamas has fired at IDF activities.
