fired from Gaza into Israel, killing one Israeli and wounding more than a dozen. The ceasefire was broken almost immediately by rocket fire from Gaza on southern Israel, followed by retaliatory Israeli airstrikes, killing at least seven Palestinians, among them two leaders of the Islamic Jihad. On August 26, 2011, Gaza militants called a second truce. On March 9, 2012, Israel Air Force, in a strike on Palestinian targets in Gaza, killed the secretary-general of the Popular Resistance Committees, Zuhir al-Qaisi, whom Israel considers as "one of the masterminds" of the August 18, 2011 attacks. Background The southern part of Israeli Highway 12 runs adjacent to Israel's border with Egypt. It was the scene of previous shooting attacks in the 1990s. In the late 2000s, the Israeli government decided to build the Israel–Egypt barrier, although by 2011 only 10% of it had been completed, none close to the site of the attack. Following the 2011 Egyptian revolution militant organizations increased their activity in the Sinai Peninsula and Al-Qaeda militants groups were established, after Egyptian police had all but completely withdrawn from the northern Sinai, dominated by Bedouin tribes. During the months preceding the cross-border attacks, Egypt reinforced its forces with about 1,000 additional soldiers in the Sinai Peninsula, with the consent of Israel, after a series of five bombings had disrupted the flow of natural gas to Israel. On July 30, militants staged an attack on an Egyptian police station in El-Arish, killing six. On August 2, a group claiming to be the Sinai wing of Al Qaeda declared its intention to create an Islamic caliphate in the Sinai. On August 14, 2011, Egyptian forces swept the Sinai Peninsula in search of terror cells. Jordanian intelligence informed the Israelis that they had information about an impending terror attack in the south of Israel. Two days prior to the attack, the Egyptian army captured four Islamist insurgents as they prepared to blow up a gas pipeline in the northern part of the Sinai Peninsula. Israeli interior security service Shin Bet had warned of terrorist attacks being planned in the region in an area 80 kilometers long, presuming that they would take place at night. The warnings led to a massive deployment of IDF troops, and the closing of Highway 12, which was reopened only on the day of the attack at the order of head of IDF's southern command Tal Russo.