A commander of the Hamas military wing was killed in an Israeli missile strike in central Gaza early Saturday, according to the Islamist militant group.

The Israeli military said its warplanes had struck several sites in northern, central and southern Gaza in retaliation for a rocket fired by Gaza militants on Friday that struck the Israeli coastal city of Ashkelon.

Both the rocket attack, which caused some property damage but no injuries, and the Israeli response signify some of the sharpest escalations in tension since the end of Israel’s three-week military offensive against Hamas in Gaza in the winter of 2008-9.

The military wing of Hamas identified the dead commander as Essa al-Batran, 40, from the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza. It said in a statement that Mr. Batran’s wife and five of his children were killed when Israeli war planes fired on his home during the Gaza war.

The Israeli military said on Saturday that it had struck a weapons-manufacturing warehouse in central Gaza, a site linked with Hamas militant activity in northern Gaza and a weapons smuggling tunnel in the south.

Hamas said that eight of its supporters and three civilians also were wounded in the airstrikes overnight, according to The Associated Press.

There has been a significant reduction in rocket fire from Gaza against southern Israel since the end of the campaign. The last time a rocket struck inside Ashkelon, a city of 125,000 about 10 miles north of Gaza, was in February 2009.

Friday’s rocket attack came only a day after the Arab League in Cairo endorsed a resumption of direct Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, although it left the timing up to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, Hamas’s rival, whose authority is now limited to the West Bank. Hamas opposes any resumption of direct peace talks.

Gaza is controlled by Hamas, which won elections in 2006 and, after months of internecine fighting, took full command of the Palestinian coastal enclave in 2007.

Nobody said Israel was right