Israel holds Iran responsible for May 29 attacks, the heaviest since 2014

Israel has held Iran responsible for provoking the most serious escalation on its southern front on Tuesday, May 29, since the end of Operation Protective Edge in 2014, the Jerusalem Post has reported.

Less than 30 days after Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps fired more than 30 rockets at northern Golan Heights, Iran-backed Islamic Jihad, along with Hamas, fired nearly 200 Iranian-made mortar shells and rockets at southern Israel, the Post said.

Israel also conducted its biggest retaliation to what the Jerusalem Post said was the largest salvo fired from Gaza Strip since 2014, hitting 60-plus Hamas targets across the strip and that included a dual-purpose tunnel dug a kilometre into Egypt's Sinai Peninsula and 900 metres into Israel's territory.

Israel Defence Forces' spokesperson Brigadier General Ronen Manelis said the tunnel they hit was meant to conduct attacks on Israel and also to smuggle weapons, the Post added.

"Despite Israel's intelligence superiority and blockades imposed by the IDF and Egypt, Hamas and other terrorist groups in the Strip have restocked their supplies of weapons in the four years since the last round of fighting between Israel and Hamas," it said.

The report also said that Israel had prevented Iranian weapons fired at the strip several times ahead of the outbreak of Operation Protective Edge. It said Israel intercepted the Klos C commercial ship which originated from Iran and was carrying Syrian rockets.

The confrontation between Israel and Iran became more direct since the US withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal that the international community had made with Iran. Israel recently even went to the extent of threatening to kill Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad if he did stop allowing Iran using his country's territory to launch attack against Israel.