Online Desk: Israel launched pre-dawn air strikes on Tuesday against the Palestinian group Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip, its military announced, with the health ministry of the Hamas-controlled territory saying 12 people were killed. The ministry said that women and children were among the dead, but did not give further details as to the identity of the victims.

An AFP journalist in Gaza saw the top of a building on fire after the strikes as well as ambulances evacuating victims. The Israeli army said it had targeted three leaders of Islamic Jihad, which it considers a terrorist organisation. The militant group confirmed three senior officials were killed, naming them in a statement as Jihad Ghannam, secretary of the Al-Quds Brigades military council, and Khalil al-Bahtini, also of the council and commander of the military wing in northern Gaza.

The third, Tareq Ezzedine, was described by Islamic Jihad as “one of the heads of military action” in the occupied West Bank who operated from Gaza. In Rafah, in the south of the Gaza Strip, an AFP photographer saw the body of a man identified as Ghannam. “We mourn the leaders and their wives and a number of their children who were killed in a cowardly Zionist crime,” Islamic Jihad said in a statement, vowing “the blood of martyrs will increase (the) resolve” of the movement.

The air strikes, which began a little after 2 am (2300 GMT), were still going nearly two hours later, according to AFP journalists, with a new explosion heard in the east. The operation comes less than a week after Islamic Jihad announced a truce around Gaza — brokered with help from Egypt — following a fresh flare-up in violence.

Israel and Gaza militants traded cross-border fire following the death in Israeli detention of Khader Adnan, who had been on hunger strike for 87 days following his arrest over ties to Islamic Jihad. On Tuesday, the militant group said Israel had “scorned all the initiatives of mediators” and vowed it would “avenge the leaders” killed in the latest air strikes.