GAZA (Reuters) – Three Palestinian fishermen killed in an explosion on the coast on Sunday found an Israeli drone with an explosive charge that had fallen into the sea and exploded in nets, the Interior Ministry said on Thursday. Hamas.
An Israeli military spokeswoman made no immediate comment. At the time of the explosion, the Israeli army had denied involvement in the incident.
The incident came at a time when Palestinian militants had launched rockets into the sea and a human rights group based in Gaza, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, said Sunday that the fishery could have been hit by accident. .
But Eyad Al-Bozom, a spokesman for Gaza’s interior ministry, said no Palestinian rockets had hit the fishing boat and that parts of an Israeli quadcopter drone carrying explosives were discovered in its nets. The drone had exploded as the fishermen lifted the nets and killed all three.
Bozom said the drone had probably been in the water since the Israeli attack on a Palestinian ship on Feb. 22 off Gaza.
The Israeli military said at the time that its forces noticed suspicious naval activity off the coast of Gaza and thwarted a “potential threat to Israeli naval vessels,” without detailing the weapons used.
The Israeli military rarely makes public comments about the use of drones carrying explosives.
Hamas, an Islamist militant group, took control of Gaza in 2007, and since then the coastal strip, home to 2 million Palestinians, has been subjected to a blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt, citing security concerns for to measure.
Nidal Almughrabi Reports; Edited by Jeffrey Heller and Peter Graff