A series of rockets have slammed into the Israeli port city
of Ashdod, just south of Tel Aviv, shortly after Israeli aircraft pounded
targets in Gaza, in an escalating conflict that has raised fears of a new war.

Israeli police said on Thursday that long-range Grad rockets
fired from the Gaza Strip hit Ashdod and an area north of the Mediterranean
port. There were no immediate reports of casualties.

“The Israeli army has just confirmed that a total of
nine rockets have been fired from the Gaza Strip,” Al Jazeera’s Nisreen
El-Shamayleh, reporting from Jerusalem, said.

“Two of them were Grad rockets, one of them landed in
Ashdod, the other one just north of Ashdod — that one is the farthest these
rockets have reached since the cross border tension started eight days
ago,” she said.

Violence along the Gaza border has worsened in recent days.

Israeli jets staged three air strikes over Gaza, hours after
a bomb struck a crowded bus stop in West Jerusalem on Wednesday, killing one
person and wounding 30 in what authorities said was the first major attack in
the city in several years.

Hamas, the Palestinian group which controls the Gaza Strip,
said on Thursday that the Israeli strikes targeted smuggling tunnels along the
Gaza-Egypt border, as well as one of its training camps in central Gaza.

A third strike hit a power transformer, causing blackouts in
the area, witnesses said. Medical workers said no one was injured in the
strikes. Hamas said it ordered its personnel to evacuate their positions.

An Israeli defense spokeswoman confirmed the sorties,
saying: “The air force targeted two tunnels at the south of the Gaza Strip
and a terrorist target in Gaza.”

The military said the strikes were a response to the recent
barrage of rockets.

Wednesday’s bombing of the bus stop in Jerusalem came
several hours after two Grad rockets fired from Gaza hit the southern Israeli
city of Beersheva.

“There was no immediate claim of responsibility.  The normal reaction is for people to
blame Palestinian groups when there is an explosion in Jerusalem, but the
police are carrying out an investigation and aren’t ruling out any possibility,”
our correspondent said.

Micky Rosenfeld, an Israeli police spokesman, told Al
Jazeera that a device in a bag that was left in a phone booth near the bus
station exploded when the bus passed.

“This was not a suicide attack,” Rosenfeld said.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, warned
Palestinian fighters not to test Israel’s “iron will,”  and vowed a tough response to the
bombing.

Ehud Barak, Israel’s defense minister, warned that Israel
will not tolerate “terrorist” attacks.

Violence has spiked in recent days, with the knife slaying
this month of a Jewish settler family as they slept and the deaths of at least
eight Palestinians, including children, in Gaza by Israeli strikes on Tuesday.

Bombings have been rare in in Jerusalem  the past several years. Palestinians
carried out dozens of bombings in the city at the height of an uprising that
began in 2000.

 Israeli
settlers, meanwhile,  observed
their own ‘Day of Rage’ last Thursday, launching reprisal attacks on
Palestinians for the recent murder of a settler family in an illegal Israeli
settlement in the occupied West Bank, and the demolition of a settlement
structure by the Israeli authorities.

Over the years, Israeli settlers have carried out the much
publicized “price tag” policy of intimidation and violence against
Palestinians and their property every time Israeli officials have demolished a
settler outpost.

The outposts, mostly comprising a few caravans often
unconnected to water and electricity, are deemed illegal by the Israeli authorities
unlike the larger settlements.

A settler family comprising a mother, father and three
children, including a three-month-old baby, were stabbed to death in Itamar, a
settlement near the city of Nablus in the northern West Bank.

Suspecting the killer or killers to be Palestinian, without
any evidence and despite rumors that Thai laborers involved in a pay dispute
with their employers in Itamar could have been responsible, settlers attacked
Palestinians and their property throughout the West Bank as their day of rage
extended over the week.

This followed days of rage carried out by pro-democracy
protestors against authoritarian governments throughout the Arab world
including Palestine.

“The government must understand that it doesn’t pay to
destroy our homes and we are going to make them regret what happened
here,” said Rabbi Meir Goldmintz, who teaches at a West Bank seminary.

“We are going to pay them (Palestinians) a visit to do
what the Israeli government should be doing to them and not to us,” he
said pointing at nearby Palestinian villages.

On Thursday, true to their word, major traffic intersections
near Nablus were blocked by settlers burning tires as cars and pedestrians were
attacked with stones and Molotov cocktails. A group of settlers firebombed a
house in the nearby village of Huwwara, forcing the evacuation of two
Palestinian children to hospital for treatment for smoke inhalation.

On Monday a Palestinian was stabbed by settlers, a shop was
set on fire and later a group of settlers were seen stoning Palestinians’ cars
in Hebron in the southern West Bank. One of the Hebron settlers also ran over a
five-year-old Palestinian boy causing moderate injuries while on Sunday an
11-year-old Palestinian girl walking to school was run over.

Jewish settlers armed with machine guns and accompanied by
Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers uprooted hundreds of olive trees planted
by Palestinian farmers near Bethlehem.

Meanwhile, the Israeli government announced that 500 new
settlement units would be built in response to the settler murders. Some
analysts argue that Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu has used the killings as
a political tool to present Israel once again as the victim in the protracted
Israeli-Palestinian conflict at a time when Israel is becoming increasingly
isolated as international condemnation of the occupation intensifies.

Simultaneously, Israeli officials have carried out a massive
demolition policy against what they describe as illegal Palestinian homes and
property built without permits in the West Bank. Palestinians face enormous
bureaucratic difficulties obtaining the permits.

“It is almost impossible for Palestinians to obtain
building permits for Area C of the West Bank, which comprises approximately 60
percent of the territory,” Sarit Michaeli from Israeli rights group
Btselem told IPS.

Israel has divided the West Bank into Area A which falls
under Palestinian control, Area B which falls under Israeli military control
and Palestinian civil control and Area C which falls under full Israeli
control.

Figures released by the United Nations show a two-fold
increase in the number of Palestinian homes and agricultural buildings
destroyed by Israel during this year, causing concern among officials.

The U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) recorded 70 demolitions since
the start of 2011, displacing 105 Palestinians, of whom 43 were under the age
of 18. The demolitions were carried out across the West Bank and East
Jerusalem, and ordered by Israeli police, municipal officials and Israel’s
Civil Administration.