The Iron Dome missile defence system has its roots in the 2006 war that Israel fought with Lebanon's militant Hezbollah movement.

Hezbollah launched thousands of rockets towards Israel, causing huge damage and killing dozens of Israelis.

A year later, Israel announced that it was developing a new missile defence shield.

The system took years to develop and came on line in early 2011.

Since then, the Iron Dome system has been used to intercept rockets regularly launched from the Gaza Strip by Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups.

The system uses radar to track incoming rockets, and then fires two interceptor missiles to knock them out.

Israeli media have reported a fresh barrage of rockets fired from Gaza into central and southern Israel, with sirens sounding in Tel Aviv, Beersheba and Ashkelon and residents rushing to bomb shelters.

Also on Thursday, the military wing of Hamas, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, said it had fired a rocket towards Ramon Airport, near Eilat, in southern Israel.

There were no immediate reports of sirens or explosions near the airport and an Israeli official quoted by Reuters news agency said the facility had not been targeted.

Earlier, Israel redirected flights from Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion International Airport to Ramon because of the security situation.

Families have been holding funerals for some of the 83 people in Gaza and seven people in Israel who have been killed since Monday.

Image source, Getty Images

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The current deadly exchange of fire is taking place during Eid, one of the most important festivals in the Muslim calendar.

"This Eid is different. This Eid comes with bombing, fear and horror," Fahd Ramadan, a 44-year-old resident in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis says.

Many of the streets there, which would otherwise be filled with people, are empty.

"There is no Eid, and there is no work because of war and missiles," says Khamees al-Jabri, a 19-year-old who would usually offer rides to children on his horse during the festivities, Reuters news agency reports.

Others, such as Khaled Mesleh from Gaza City, say they will celebrate despite the violence.

"We will celebrate Eid to tell everyone that Gaza likes life and that Gaza children want to wear the clothes of Eid like all children of the world."

Eid marks the end of Ramadan, a month of fasting from dawn to sunset, as well as spiritual reflection and prayer.

Jeremy Bowen
BBC Middle East editor, Jerusalem

Sectarian violence between Israeli citizens is a new and vicious dimension of the crisis that is sliding deeper into war.

In Gaza, the military wing of Hamas said its missile attacks were a continuation of the Palestinian uprising in Jerusalem. The religious and political combustibility of Jerusalem has fed into the anger on Israel’s streets.

The mob attacks are more than sudden fury or violent thuggery. They’re a sign of a deep fracture, much worse than many Israelis had realised. Israel’s President, Reuven Rivlin, appealed for calm and said the country should not abandon itself to a civil war.

Around 20% of Israelis are from Palestinian families who stayed in Israel after its independence war in 1948 - when more than 700,000 other Palestinians either fled or were expelled at gunpoint by Jews.

Palestinians in Israel are showing a deeper sense of solidarity with their cousins in the occupied territories.

Another factor is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s populist Jewish nationalism and anti-Arab rhetoric. He’s brought Jewish hardliners closer to the mainstream of Israeli politics.

Image source, Reuters

The Hamas-run Palestinian health ministry in Gaza says the death toll there from Israeli air strikes that began on Monday has risen to 83, with more than 480 people wounded. At least 17 children are among the dead, it says.

Meanwhile, Israeli medics say seven people have so far been killed in Israel by rockets launched from Gaza, including two children. On Wednesday, a six-year-old boy who died after a rocket struck a home in the town of Sderot.

The Israeli military says Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups have launched more than 1,500 rockets towards Israel. It says it has responded by carrying out hundreds of strikes on military targets and killing dozens of militants.

A spokesman for Hamas's military wing, Abu Ubaidah, meanwhile says there is little sign of the conflict subsiding soon. He warns that there are "no red lines" when it comes to the group's action against Israel.

Image source, Getty Images

The latest violence followed a month of rising tensions, though the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians has gone on for decades.

Jews and Arabs living in Palestine each wanted their own country there. The Jewish state of Israel was created on part of the land in a war in 1948. The Arabs who fled or were forced out became stateless Palestinians and this has been a continuous source of conflict.

Palestinians still seek their own independent state in land occupied by Israel during another war in 1967 - the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. But Israel makes claims of its own to the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and is in overall control there.

To find out more about the Israeli-Palestinian situation, please see our guide here.

Image source, Eitan Singer

Eitan Singer, a 50-year-old Israeli father of three who lives in the north of Tel Aviv, has been speaking to the BBC about the situation on the ground there:

"We thought we were getting back to a routine after Covid. We were green-lighted. And now this happens.

We are suffering. We get the usual threats from Gaza, but now many cities in Israel with Arabs and Jews suddenly have lots of troubles too.

This situation is much more worrying than anything I have seen during my 50 years of life. It is a double threat, because we have threats from outside Israel and inside Israel.

Life inside Israel is dangerous. I was in a restaurant on Tuesday evening. Suddenly, fireworks started across the sky - they were throwing missiles everywhere. It seemed like 200 missiles simultaneously. The sirens were all over. People were lying on the ground, below trees. It just happened so suddenly and at a high volume. Kids were crying. This is unbelievable in 2021.

I have three kids. My young daughter is very frightened. We are getting up at night and finding it hard to get back to sleep. There is no school for the children. This is coming after a year of being at home due to Covid."

The overall trend in Palestinian weaponry is for rockets to have increased ranges and larger explosive payloads.

Israel says about 200 of the rockets fired so far have fallen within the Gaza strip itself and about 90% of those fired into Israel have been intercepted.

Image source, Getty Images

Muslims in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank have been celebrating Eid despite the escalation of violence.

Eid al-Fitr, the festival of the breaking of the fast, marks the end of Ramadan with prayers and a big meal.

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Image source, AFP/Getty Images

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Jeremy Bowen
BBC Middle East editor

My colleagues in Gaza say it was a terribly long and noisy night - a time when they should be celebrating the end of Ramadan. Israelis, of course, were in their shelters within rocket range of Gaza.

There are appeals for calm coming from abroad but this is not going to end, I think, until both sides can find a way of declaring a victory that they like.

Hamas will want to be able to say they defended Palestinians and Jerusalem, and Israelis will want to do something that they call restoring deterrents, which essentially means giving a good hammering to anybody who raises a hand against them.

So I think this has got some way to go at the moment. Let's hope I'm wrong, of course, because it's miserable for everybody caught up in it.

Hamas militants have launched dozens of rockets at Israel again on Thursday, a day after Israeli air strikes killed senior commanders and destroyed a multi-storey building in Gaza.

The escalation of the fighting, which began on Monday, has prompted the UN to warn of a "full-scale war".

More than 70 people in Gaza and seven people in Israel have been killed since then.

Ros Atkins looks at the recent events that triggered this latest violence.

In one incident, camera crews broadcast the moment live on television when a crowd of Jewish Israelis attacked a driver in Bat Yam, a coastal city just south of Tel Aviv.

After vandalising Arab-owned property in the city, the group turned on the driver on the beachfront promenade. While they say the man was trying to ram them in his car, some argue that the footage appears to shows him trying to reverse away and then speed past the crowd.

Meanwhile, a Jewish man in Acre is reportedly in a serious condition after being attacked by Arab demonstrators. Police said the group was armed with sticks and rocks, and footage reportedly from the scene shows a group chasing and beating the man on the ground as he tries to protect himself.

Groups of Arab Israelis were also reported to be demonstrating in cities including Jerusalem, Haifa, Tamra, and Lod, where the government imposed a state of emergency after violence there on Tuesday.

About 21% of Israel's population are Israeli Arabs - about 1.96 million people, according to a December report by Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics.

Read more here

As we have been reporting, the escalation in violence has triggered street violence in Israel between Jews and Israeli Arabs.

More than 374 people have been arrested and 36 officers have been injured, Israeli police said.

There have been calls from across the political spectrum in Israel for calm.

Issawi Fredj, an Arab deputy from the left-wing Meretz party, said the images of the Bat Yam attack were a sign the country was heading towards "civil war".

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement that "what has been happening in the last few days in the cities of Israel is unacceptable".

"Nothing justifies the lynching of Arabs by Jews and nothing justifies the lynching of Jews by Arabs."

Israel's chief Sephardic rabbi Yitzhak Yossef called for an end to attacks by Jews.

"Innocent citizens are being attacked by terrorist organisations," he said. "The heart is heavy and the images difficult, but we cannot allow ourselves to be drawn into provocations and aggressions."

Opposition leader Yair Lapid, who will soon attempt to form a government, said that "the rioters in Lod and Acre do not represent Israeli Arabs, the rioters in Bat Yam... do not represent Israeli Jews.

"Violence will not dictate our lives".

Read more: Jewish and Arab mobs spread violence

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Israel is sending military reinforcements to its border with Gaza, army officials have told the BBC.

It follows earlier reports that troops were being prepared for a possible ground operation, a move that would recall similar incursions during Israel-Gaza wars in 2014 and 2008-2009.

"There are troops that are being moved towards the borders," Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman Lt Col Jonathan Conricus said, adding: "It's a preparatory move."

He said 3,000 army reservists had also been called up and military officials on the border had been ordered by the government to prepare for “all eventualities and an escalation”.

"They are there in battle procedure, basically preparing for battle - that is what they’re doing," Col Conricus said.

"But that is not necessarily the first thing we will do tomorrow morning - our focus is on degrading enemy capabilities," he added.

Image source, Reuters

In total, about 21% of Israel's population are Israeli Arabs - about 1.96 million people, according to a December report by Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics.

During the war that surrounded the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, hundreds of thousands of Arabs were forced from or fled their homes. Those who stayed in what became Israel, and their descendants, have been granted citizenship and are known as Israeli Arabs.

About 80% of Israeli Arabs are Muslim, with the rest identifying as either Christian or Druze. Most identify strongly with Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and occupied West Bank, with many calling themselves "Palestinian citizens of Israel".

Israel's government says its Arab citizens have equal social and political rights, although they are exempt from compulsory military service.

But Israeli Arabs themselves say they are treated as second-class citizens who face legal, institutional and social discrimination.

Image source, Reuters

Nadia Sheikh Ahmed, a mother of five who lives in the Gaza Strip, tells the BBC the situation is "terrifying".

"You cannot sleep, you cannot calm your children, you cannot be secure," she says.

Nadia says the air strikes can at any point turn her home into a "graveyard".

"The feelings of being insecure inside your home – the only place that can give you the feeling of being safe and secure – in Gaza City, in the Gaza Strip, these feelings do not exist.

"At any moment your home might be your grave."

Image source, Reuters

A mother who fled the Israeli town of Lod, where Israeli Arabs have staged protests in sympathy with Palestinians in Jerusalem and Gaza, says she felt she had to leave her home after receiving "shocking" messages on a community WhatsApp group.

Speaking to the BBC's Today programme, Tova Levy says her apartment is in a building where more than half of residents are Arab.

"One of my friends told us that she could hear her Arab neighbour, an old woman, who was directing a mob to throw stones and rocks into their house – she was telling them where it is."

Tova says she was "shaking" at the thought of her home being targeted.

"I didn't see why they wouldn't come into my house next… what is to keep them breaking down my door?"

Image source, Getty Images

The escalation, which began on Monday, has triggered street violence in Israel between Jews and Israeli Arabs.

In two incidents, a Jewish man in Acre was attacked by Arab men, and a Jewish mob pulled a Palestinian out of his car and beat him up in Bat Yam.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking late on Wednesday night, said he planned to send in military forces to help police maintain order in cities ruptured by violence.

Mr Netanyahu said the attacks in recent days amounted to "anarchy".

"Nothing can justify an Arab mob assaulting Jews, and nothing can justify a Jewish mob assaulting Arabs," he said in a video statement, as reported by the Times of Israel.