JERUSALEM – An officer and a soldier were killed and four others injured in two separate incidents in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli military said Sunday.
Captain Noam Ravid and Staff Sergeant Yaly Seror, from the Yahalom elite engineering unit, were killed when an explosive device detonated in a tunnel shaft they were inspecting inside a building in the southern city of Rafah, said the military.
One soldier was seriously wounded and another moderately injured in the same blast, the military said. Both were evacuated to a hospital in Israel.
In a separate incident in northern Gaza, two reservists with the Jerusalem Brigade’s 7007th Battalion were wounded, one of them seriously, it added.
The Israeli Army Radio reported that the two were injured after a tank shell malfunctioned and exploded. The soldiers had fired the shell from an Israeli position when the explosion occurred.
The incidents came as the military was preparing to expand its operation in the Gaza Strip, saying on Saturday that it would mobilize thousands of reservists in the coming days.
Six Israeli soldiers have been killed since Israel resumed its military operation in Gaza on March 18, according to an Israeli tally.
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