Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrives at a Cabinet meeting at his office in Jerusalem yesterday. Photo: Reuters

Israeli aircraft attacked at least six militant targets in the Gaza Strip yesterday, hours after rockets fired from the Palestinian territory set a factory in Israel on fire, Israeli and Palestinian officials said.

Palestinian medics said two people were wounded in air strikes on eight sites. Israeli officials said only six sites were bombed.

Three people were injured in the attack on the Israeli factory, a paint manufacturing plant in the southern town of Sderot that caught fire, police said.

“Over the weekend, the Israel Defence Forces attacked multiple targets in response to firing at Israel from the Gaza Strip,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in public remarks to his Cabinet.

“We are ready to expand this operation, if necessary,” he said.

Palestinian officials said targets hit in the Israeli air strikes belonged to Hamas’s armed wing – the Izz el-Deen al-Qassam Brigades – Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committees.

Hamas, an Islamist movement that seized the Gaza Strip from forces loyal to Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in 2007, signed a reconciliation deal with him in April under which a unity government was formed on June 2.

Israeli attack took place hours after rockets were fired from Palestinian territory

Since the beginning of June, militants in the Gaza Strip have fired 60 rockets at Israel in attacks that have caused few injuries, the Israeli military said.

In Gaza, Israeli air strikes have totalled more than 80 this month and killed two militants and wounded about a dozen other people, Palestinian officials said.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu also voiced support for Kurdish statehood yesterday, taking a position that appeared to clash with the US preference to keep sectarian war-torn Iraq united.

Israel has maintained discreet military, intelligence and business ties with the Kurds since the 1960s, seeing in the minority ethnic group a buffer against shared Arab adversaries. The Kurds have seized on recent sectarian chaos in Iraq to expand their autonomous northern territory to include Kirkuk, which sits on vast oil deposits that could make the independent state many dream of economically viable.

But Iraqi Kurds, who have ethnic compatriots in Iran, Turkey and Syria, have hesitated to declare full independence, one reason being the feared response of neighbouring countries.