Sharjah 24 – AFP: Israeli air strikes hit Hamas military sites in the Gaza Strip on Saturday in response to rocket fire from the Palestinian enclave run by Hamas, the Israeli army said in a statement.

The strikes came after Hamas "launched a rocket... toward southern Israel", it said, adding the projectile was intercepted by Israel's air defences.

The Israeli "aircraft targeted a weapons manufacturing site located inside a Hamas military post and an additional three military posts belonging to Hamas," the statement said.

Balls of flame shot into the air, leaving dark smoke drifting over the territory, after the strikes.

The army said hours earlier that air raid sirens were sounded in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon and in areas near the blockaded Gaza Strip.

The exchange came after three Palestinians were killed and 12 others wounded on Friday during an Israeli army raid in Jenin, a stronghold of armed Palestinian factions in the occupied West Bank.

The men were killed when Israeli forces opened fire on a vehicle in which they were, the Palestinian news agency Wafa said.

That exchange came after nearly a month of deadly violence focused on Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem's flashpoint Al-Aqsa mosque compound, the third holiest site in Islam.