Israel hits Gaza tunnel in response to latest rocket attack

The Israel Air Force attacked a smuggling tunnel in the Gaza Strip before dawn on Monday, after a Qassam rocket fired by Palestinian militants struck an open field in a kibbutz near the southern city of Ashkelon a day earlier.
The Israel Defense Forces confirmed a direct hit on its target.
The Qassam on Sunday, which caused no casualties or damages, came three days after a foreign worker was killed by a rocket in the northern Negev.
Four rockets were fired at communities in the Negev over the weekend, after 12 rockets and mortar shells hit the area over the course of last week. The Color Red rocket alert sounded a number of times on Saturday, forcing residents to stay in protected areas.
Since Israel concluded its offensive on the Gaza Strip last January, more than 400 rockets and mortar shells have been fired at southern Israel.
Israeli F16 warplanes carried out two successive airstrikes on the southern Gaza Strip on Friday night, wounding at least 14 people, in response to earlier rocket attacks, witnesses and medics said.
The witnesses said Israeli warplanes targeted the inoperative Gaza
airport east of the southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah. After a short while, Israeli warplanes struck two smuggling tunnels under the Gaza
Strip-Egypt borders.
Friday's airstrikes came after militants fired five rockets at Israel in 24 hours, one of them killing the Thai worker near Ashkelon.
Medics at Abu Yousef al-Najjar Hospital in Rafah town said that at least 12 Palestinians were injured, two of them seriously, in the second airstrike that targeted the two tunnels.