By Xinhua
Jerusalem : Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Sunday that Israeli army was ordered to step up its operation to halt the ongoing firing of rockets from the Gaza Strip.
“We will continue to respond, to initiate and to harm anyone who carries out launches from Gaza,” Olmert told ministers at the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem.
“We will continue to invest in reinforcing the towns in the Gaza envelope to help them deal with these terror threats,” he added.
A Katyusha rocket fell at an open field in northern Ashkelon on Thursday morning, which was described by Olmert as a grave escalation in terror activities from Gaza.
Israeli army estimated that the Katyusha traveled 17 km, the farthest distance a rocket of this sort had reached.
However, local daily Ha’aretz quoted an Israeli defense source as saying that the Israel Defense Forces was not planning a wide-scale military operation on Gaza, though it has stepped up its use of warplanes.
Israeli forces shot dead a Palestinian civilian in central Gaza Strip and wounded four others during a ground military operation on Sunday.
Earlier on Sunday, an Israeli air strike in the northern Gaza Strip killed a member of the Popular Resistance Committees, a militant group allied with Hamas, Palestinian officials said.
The strike came hours after the group said it fired a barrage of rockets into Israel.