A Russian-style Grad rocket struck the southern Israeli desert city of Beersheba Wednesday evening, witnesses reported.
The missile hit the yard of a house, whose family was not hurt because they were hiding in the building's safe-room. A siren wailing through the city had warned them. A second missile fell in the nearby town of Netivot, dpa reported.
A military spokeswoman in Tel Aviv said it was the first time a missile fell in the city of some 200,0000 residents since the Gaza war of the winter of 2008-2009.
Beersheba is known as the "capital" of the southern Israeli Negev desert.
Palestinian militants from Gaza fired at the city for the first time during that three-week Gaza war, launched by Israel in a bid to curb then near-daily rocket and mortar fire from the strip that paralyzed life in its southern towns and villages.
Since the Israeli offensive, sporadic rocket and mortar attacks have continued, but mostly at smaller communities in the immediate vicinity of Gaza. A small number have also landed near the southern coastal city of Ashkelon.
Israel was likely to respond to the Beersheba attack.
Some 1,400 Palestinians, many of them civilians, were killed in relentless Israeli shelling from the air, ground and sea of Hamas targets in densely populated Gaza during the December 27, 2008 to January 18, 2009 offensive.
Since then, Israel and the Islamist movement running Gaza have largely respected an informal truce, but in recent weeks, violence has been on the rise.