UPDATE 2-Islamic Jihad says it has ended rocket fire after two days of Gaza-Israel hostilities

The Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad said on Monday it had ended its "military response" to Israel after two days of firing rockets from Gaza at its neighbour, which responded in turn with air strikes. The Islamist group launched dozens of rockets, while Israel carried out air strikes on Gaza and sites in Syria that killed three Islamic Jihad members.

The violence comes a week before an Israeli election in which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is seeking a fifth term in office after two inconclusive votes. Witnesses in Gaza reported hearing Israeli strikes after Islamic Jihad's announcement, and the Israeli military confirmed that it was hitting targets connected with the group in the coastal enclave.

The latest fighting began around dawn on Sunday when Israeli troops killed an Islamic Jihad member who was trying to plant explosives near Israel's border fence with the Gaza Strip. Video footage shot by a Gaza photographer and widely shared on social media showed what appeared to be the lifeless body of the militant dangling from an Israeli military bulldozer as it removed the corpse.

The images created an uproar in Gaza, prompting calls for retaliation. Islamic Jihad later fired a barrage of rockets into Israel. Just before midnight on Sunday, Israeli warplanes struck what the military called "a hub of Islamic Jihad's activity in Syria" in the Adeliyah region outside Syria's capital Damascus.

Islamic Jihad continued to fire rockets into southern Israeli communities into Monday, as funerals for the group's two dead militants were held in the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus. The Gaza rocket fire sent residents of southern Israel running to shelters, and the Israeli military said it had closed down roads in the area as a precaution. No casualties were reported.

But around nightfall on Monday, Islamic Jihad's armed wing said in a statement that it had "ended its military response to the crime of assassination in Khan Younis and Damascus". "(We) promise our people and our nation (we) will continue in (our) Jihad and will respond to any violation by the occupation against our people," the statement said.

The announcement came as Egypt, Qatar, and the United Nations urged both sides to show restraint. There was no sign that Gaza's Islamist rulers Hamas had been drawn into the rocket firing.

An uneasy truce between Israel and Hamas has helped stave off the sort of large-scale fighting that led to Israel-Gaza wars in 2014 and 2008.

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)