Off the wire
• Commentary: South China Sea arbitration a scar on international legal system  • UNWTO, partners launch e-toolkit to help hotels reach zero-energy consumption  • China edges past France in basketball friendly  • Loew to stay as Germany coach until 2018  • China's Wanda buys Europe's largest movie theater operator  • Senior official asks Taiwanese youth to better understand mainland  • Jordan urges more efforts to help Syrian refugees  • Turkey helps Gaza to tackle decade-long electricity crisis  • 1st LD-Writethru: China wants to see prosperous, stable EU, Britain: Xi  • China asks Japan to stop interfering in South China Sea  
You are here: 　 Home

Israeli civilian crossed fence into Gaza Strip: army

Xinhua, July 12, 2016 Adjust font size:

An Israeli civilian had crossed the Israeli-Gaza border fence and entered the Gaza Strip on Tuesday noon, the Israeli army said.

"Earlier today, an Israeli man was identified crossing from Israel into the Gaza Strip," an Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson said in a statement on Tuesday.

"The incident is being reviewed," it added.

Israel occupied the West Bank, east Jerusalem and Gaza Strip territories, home to several millions of Palestinians, in the 1967 Mideast War.

Israel evacuated its Jewish settlements and withdrew its military forces from the Gaza Strip in 2005. After a bout of internal strife among the Palestinians in 2007, the Hamas Islamist organization took over the Gaza Strip.

Israel and Egypt operate crossings into and out of the strip and a naval siege is placed on the Gaza enclave.

Israel had conducted several rounds of fighting with Hamas in the past decade. The latest round of fighting took place in the summer of 2014 for two months, claiming the lives of more than 2,200 Palestinians and over 70 Israelis and wreaking havoc on the enclave.

The war ended with a fragile ceasefire, mediated by Egypt, in August 2014. Since then the situation remained mostly calm, with sporadic rocket fire from the Gaza Strip into Israeli territory, retaliated by Israeli air strikes in the strip.

However, there have been several incidents across the border fence, amid the discovery of two underground tunnels apparently used by Hamas recently, as well as an ongoing wave of violence in Israel and the West Bank territories in which 34 Israelis and 215 Palestinians were killed.

This is not the first time an Israeli civilian crossed into the Gaza Strip.

Last July, it was revealed that two Israelis are thought to be held captive in Gaza for several months after crossing the border on two separate occasions.

The first is an Israeli Ethiopian, Avraham Mengistu, from the southern coastal city of Ashkelon. He had crossed into the strip in September 2014. Hamas acknowledged he was captured by them, but said he had since been released and had crossed into Egypt.

The other Israeli is a Bedouin citizen whose name was not cleared for publication. Bedouin Arabs are desert dwelling tribes, located mostly in Israel's southern Negev Desert. Hamas did not acknowledge his capture. Endit