GAZA (Reuters) – Three Palestinian fishermen who died in a foreign blast on Sunday encountered an explosive Israeli drone that fell into the sea and blew up their nets, the Interior Ministry in Gaza said on Thursday.
An Israeli military spokesman made no immediate comment. At the time of the blast, the Israeli army denied any involvement in the incident.
The incident came at a time when Palestinian militants were testing rockets into the sea, and a human rights group in Gaza, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, said on Sunday the fishing boat might have been hit by accident.
But Eyad Al-Bozom, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry in Gaza, said no Palestinian rocket hit the fishing boat, and that parts of an Israeli quadcopter drone with explosives were discovered in its nets. The drone blew up as the fishermen lifted their nets and killed all three.
Bozom said the drone had probably been in the water since an Israeli attack on a Palestinian naval vessel on February 22 outside Gaza.
The Israeli army said at the time that its forces had spotted suspicious naval activity in front of the Gaza Strip and obstructed a “possible threat to Israeli naval vessels” without elaborating on the weapons used.
The Israeli military rarely comments on the use of drones carrying explosives.
Hamas, an Islamic militant group, took control of Gaza in 2007 and the beach strip, where 2 million Palestinians live, has since been under a blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt, raising security concerns.
(Reporting by Nidal Almughrabi; Editing by Jeffrey Heller and Peter Graff)