Three men were said to be injured by an explosion at a Hamas-run terror training camp in the Gaza Strip, The Times of Israel reported Monday.
According to media associated with Hamas, the terror group that rules Gaza, the explosion took place at a Hamas military site.
“Three men sustained varied levels of injuries resulting from an accident near Tel al-Sultan, west of Rafah,” Ashraf al-Qidre, spokesman for the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, said in a statement.
In its preparation for a new war with Israel, Hamas acknowledged that it lost 22 of its fighters in 2016–mostly in the collapses of tunnels it built to attack Israelis.
The New York Times reported last May that Gazans feared Hamas’ placement of military facilities in residential areas was endangering them. One woman told the Times she worried that Hamas’ tunnels, which extend through her neighborhood, would cause her family to be “torn apart” in any future fighting. “I am sure, one million percent, that those with tunnels under their houses cannot sleep, or taste the joy of life,” she added.
An explosion in 2015 at a terror training camp injured 50 people, mostly women and children.
Gen. Yossi Kuperwasser, formerly the head of the research division of Israeli military intelligence and later the director general of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, told reporters in May of last year that the discovery of new terror tunnels since Israel’s 2014 war with Hamas was a clear sign that the terrorist organization was prepping for another war against Israel. “They definitely invest a lot in making the necessary preparations so that in the next round, when they decide to start it, they will be able to inflict the heaviest damage on Israel, including through those tunnels,” he added.
Israel went to war with Hamas in the summer of 2014 in order to stop the terror group from firing rockets at civilians and eliminate the threat posed by its tunnels. Israel completely withdrew from Gaza in 2005, two years before Hamas took over the territory after a civil war with Fatah. According to the Israel Defense Forces, Palestinian terror groups have launched over 11,000 rockets at Israel since 2005, with over five million Israeli civilians living under threat of rocket fire.
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