Rockets fired at Beersheba, Sdot Hanegev Regional Council; Beersheba cancels school due to ongoing attacks.
By JPOST.COM STAFFAshdod blast site_370(photo credit: Yaakov Lappin)
Municipal authorities in Beersheba announced that classes would be canceled on Friday as rocket attacks by terrorists in Gaza continued on Thursday.Red-alert sirens echoed through Beersheba Thursday morning as a Grad rocket launched in Gaza was intercepted by the Iron Dome anti-rocket defense system. Earlier, a shorter-range Kassam rocket exploded in the Sdot Hangev Regional Council near the town of Netivot. There were no casualties or damage reported in the attacks.While Beersheba schools would remain closed on Friday, other municipalities and localities in the South had yet to decide whether to cancel classes.Speaking with local authority heads on Thursday, Vice Prime Minister Moshe Ya'alon said a "tough response" was needed in order to stop terrorists in Gaza from launching rockets at southern Israeli communities.Ya'alon said the ongoing rocket fire is "intolerable.""Southern communities don't need to be under threat," Channel 10 news quoted Ya'alon as saying. "I am sure that we are ready to end this constant provocation by utilizing a tough response."Ya'alon said that he thought Israel had not done enough, yet, to quell the disturbances in the South.The rocket attacks renewed on Thursday after IAF warplanes targeted a rocket launching site and a smuggling tunnel in the southern Gaza Strip overnight Wednesday. Palestinians did not report casualties in those strikes.The IAF attacks were in response to two Grad-model Katyusha rockets that terrorists in Gaza fired towards Beersheba.The assessment within the army is that the rockets were fired by small, splinter terrorist groups and not by Islamic Jihad, which was behind the bulk of the rocket fire into Israel since Friday.Ya'akov Katz contributed to this report. Click here for special JPost coverage
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