Israel says it intercepted rocket fired from Gaza

Israel intercepted a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, the Israeli army said, hours after US Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited the region urging calm.

The launch, which was not immediately claimed by any armed group in the Israeli-besieged coastal territory, came amid continued violence following the new extreme-right Israeli government’s assumption of power, which has seen Israeli forces kill at least 35 Palestinians in 2023 alone.

Israeli forces killed nine Palestinians during a deadly massacre in the West Bank's Jenin on Thursday and in response a Palestinian gunman on Friday killed seven people outside a synagogue in the Neve Yaakov settlement in occupied east Jerusalem.

The Israeli army said "one rocket was fired from the Gaza Strip" on Wednesday and was "intercepted" by Israel's air defence system.

The Israeli army said sirens sounded in the city of Sderot and other areas close to Gaza but there were no immediate reports of casualties from the incident.

Blinken left the region late Tuesday after meeting Israeli and Palestinian leaders in the West Bank.

The US has no contact with Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip and which it considers a terrorist organisation.

The top US diplomat had urged both sides to take "urgent steps" to restore calm.

The year 2022 was the deadliest for Palestinians in the West Bank since the United Nations started tracking fatalities in the occupied territory in 2005.

Blinken said he was leaving senior staff behind in the region, in hopes of implementing "constructive ideas" to stem the fighting.

"What we're seeing now for Palestinians is a shrinking horizon of hope, not an expanding one, and that too, we believe, needs to change," Blinken said in Ramallah on Tuesday.

Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas told Blinken that Israel was "responsible for what is happening today".