JERUSALEM — Cross-border tensions between Israel and Gaza simmered on Sunday as Egyptian efforts to restore an informal cease-fire began to take effect after a deadly round of Israeli airstrikes and Palestinian rocket attacks on Saturday.
The Israeli military fired on what it said was a terrorist squad in southern Gaza preparing to fire rockets at Israel on Sunday afternoon. Gaza security officials said one Palestinian militant was killed and another was seriously wounded. Both, it said, were members of the armed wing of the leftist Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
The main clashes on Saturday were between Israeli forces and Islamic Jihad, another group that sometimes acts independently of Hamas, the much larger militant group that controls Gaza.
Israel said it had carried out several airstrikes against Islamic Jihad squads preparing to fire rockets on Saturday, killing nine militants. Islamic Jihad and other smaller groups fired barrages of rockets at cities in southern Israel, killing one Israeli civilian, Moshe Ami, 56, in the coastal city of Ashkelon.
A spokesman for the armed wing of Islamic Jihad, identified only as Abu Ahmed, told reporters early Sunday that his group had accepted the Egyptian effort to restore an informal truce, but said that the group reserved its right “to respond to Israeli aggression.”
In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he was not seeking an escalation, but emphasized that anyone trying to attack Israel was taking their life in their hands.
“There is no cease-fire,” Mr. Netanyahu said Sunday, adding that the military “protects the residents of the south and wipes out the rocket launchers.”
“I promise that the other side will pay an even heavier price than it has up to now, until it stops firing,” he warned.
Hamas has largely maintained the fragile cease-fire that went into effect after Israel ended its three-week military offensive in Gaza in early 2009. The smaller factions in Gaza are less committed, but are under pressure from Hamas to comply.
Egypt’s General Intelligence agency has direct channels of communication with the main Palestinian groups and their armed wings in Gaza, and it is in regular contact with the Hamas government there. Soon after the confrontation started Saturday, Al Aqsa TV, the Hamas channel in Gaza, reported that the Hamas authorities had contacted Egypt in a bid to contain the violence.
In a separate development, an Israeli court on Sunday sentenced a former soldier to four and a half years in prison after she was found guilty of stealing more than 2,000 classified military documents during her compulsory army service from 2005 to 2007 and leaking them to a reporter at the newspaper Haaretz. A more serious charge of harming state security was dropped as part of a plea agreement.
The judges said the soldier, Anat Kam, 24, who served in the office of the commander of the Central Command, which is responsible for the West Bank, had acted mainly out of ideological motives. The editor in chief of Haaretz at the time, Dov Alfon, said last year that all the articles in question were sent to Israel’s military censor and received full permission for publication.
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