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Israel Broadens Bombing in Gaza to Civilian Sites Israel Broadens Its Bombing in Gaza to Include Government Sites
(about 3 hours later)
GAZA — Israel expanded its four-day assault on Gaza on Saturday, broadening its airstrikes from military targets to the civilian political infrastructure, leveling the headquarters here of the Hamas prime minister and striking police and security buildings. GAZA CITY — Israel broadened its assault on the Gaza Strip on Saturday from mostly military targets to centers of government infrastructure, obliterating the four-story headquarters of the Hamas prime minister with a barrage of five bombs.
Hamas continued to fire rockets at Israel, including a pair intended for the city of Tel Aviv. One landed harmlessly, probably at sea; the other was thwarted in midair by Israel. The attack came a day after the prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, hosted his Egyptian counterpart in that very building, a sign of Hamas’s new legitimacy in a radically redrawn Arab world. That stature was underscored Saturday by a visit to Gaza from the Tunisian foreign minister and the rapid convergence in Cairo of two Hamas allies, the prime minister of Turkey and the crown prince of Qatar, for talks with the Egyptian president and the chairman of Hamas on a possible cease-fire.
In Cairo, the leaders of Hamas, Turkey and Qatar gathered to try to broker a truce. Hamas officials were in indirect contact with Israel through Egyptian intelligence intermediaries, an official of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood said. But the violent conflict showed no sign of abating as it finished its fourth day. Gaza militants again fired long-range missiles at the population center of Tel Aviv, among nearly 60 that soared into Israel on Saturday, injuring five civilians in an apartment building in Ashdod, in southern Israel, and four soldiers in an unidentified location.
The talks were reported to be deadlocked on Saturday evening, while continued attacks in Gaza and Israel, and Israeli preparations for a possible ground invasion, suggested that neither side was ready to end the fight. Israel said it hit more than 200 targets overnight and continued with afternoon strikes on a Hamas commander’s home in the Gaza City neighborhood of Zeitoun and on a motorcycle-riding militant in the southern border town of Rafah. Israel has also made preparations for a possible ground invasion.
The air raid that struck the office of the Hamas prime minister, Ismael Haniyeh, came about 4 a.m., reducing the four-story building where weekly cabinet meetings were held to a huge pile of rubble. Hamas health officials said 45 Palestinians had been killed and 385 wounded since Wednesday’s escalation in the cross-border battle; 3 Israelis have died and 63 civilians have been injured.
Three Palestinian flags that used to hang over the entryway were draped across the dusty mess, with datebooks and personnel records scattered about. Mr. Haniyeh’s gray-bearded face beamed from a page  of a Hamas booklet promoting “the government’s achievements despite the obstacles.” “Everybody is afraid of what’s next,” said Mkhaimar Abusada, a political science professor at Al Azhar University in Cairo, predicting that the rockets fired at Tel Aviv and, on Friday, at Jerusalem, would provoke a rerun of Israel’s ground invasion four years ago.
A security official, who asked to be identified only as Abu el Abed, took one of the fallen flags and replanted it upright. “We will rebuild this place as we have rebuilt others,” he said. “Every structure that is demolished or destroyed is a big loss, but the blood of anybody wounded is more important than any structure. This place will be rebuilt and the occupation will go and we will stay.” Mr. Abusada and Efraim Halevy, a former head of Israel’s intelligence service, both said there is no clear endgame to the conflict, since Israel neither wants to re-engage in Gaza nor to eliminate Hamas and leave the territory to the chaos of more militant factions. “Ultimately,” Mr. Halevy said, “both sides want Hamas to remain in control, strange as it sounds.”
Mark Regev, a spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, said government buildings had been targeted because Hamas “makes no distinction between its terrorist military machine and the government structure.” But Mr. Abusada cautioned that “there is no military solution to the Gaza problem,” saying: “There has to be a political settlement at the end of this. Without that, this conflict is just going to go on and on.”
“We have seen Hamas consistently using so-called civilian facilities for the purposes of hiding their terrorist military machine, including weapons,” Mr. Regev said. In Cairo, a senior official of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group allied with President Mohamed Morsi, said he was working furiously on Saturday to secure a cease-fire. Mr. Morsi met with the Turkish premiere, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, while Egypt’s foreign minister huddled with the Qatari prince and its intelligence chief sat with Khaled Meshaal, the chief of Hamas’s political wing, Egyptian media reported.
The Israeli military said that it had struck more than 200 targets overnight, including underground rocket launchers and smuggling tunnels in Rafah, on the Gaza-Egypt border. The military also said that it struck the police and homeland security headquarters of Hamas, as well as the house of a Hamas commander, Ahmed Randor. Hamas, which has controlled the Gaza Strip since 2007 but is considered a terrorist organization by Israel and the United States, wants to turn its Rafah crossing with Egypt into an open, free-trade zone, and for Israel to withdraw from the 1,000-foot buffer it patrols on Gaza’s northern and eastern borders. The Brotherhood official said that the Israeli side of the talks remained “the sticking point,” though he would not be specific about the issues.
Hamas’s military wing, the Qassam Brigades, claimed responsibility for firing an Iranian-made rocket at Tel Aviv. Ben Rhodes, Mr. Obama’s deputy national security adviser, told reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Asia that the president had spoken daily with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel since the crisis began, as well as to Mr. Erdogan and Mr. Morsi.
Israel appeared to be keeping up the pressure on military targets as well. “They have the ability to play a constructive role in engaging Hamas and encouraging a process of de-escalation,” Mr. Rhodes said of the Turkish and Egyptian leaders. Describing rocket fire coming from Gaza as “the precipitating factor for the conflict,” he added, “We believe Israel has a right to defend itself and they’ll make their own decisions about the tactics that they use in that regard.”
Hamas said seven of its members were killed Saturday morning in two separate attacks — four in Rafah, and three in the Al Maghazi refugee camp, in the middle of the Gaza Strip. The deadliest airstrikes today were reported in the southern town of Rafah, which borders Egypt, where six people, including four Hamas fighters, were killed in separate raids. But the Tunisian foreign minister, standing outside Al Shifa Hospital here, told reporters that Israel “has to respect the international law to stop the aggression against the Palestinian people.”
Israeli F16 airplanes hit a house for a commander of the Qassam Brigades in southeast Gaza City, but the house was empty at the time, Hamas officials said. The Israeli military also released video of what it said was an attack Saturday on the house of the Hamas northern brigade commander, Ahmed Randor, and said that it showed the secondary explosions that took place because of ammunition stored under the commander’s house. Mr. Netanyahu, for his part, spoke Saturday with the leaders of Germany, Italy, Greece and the Czech Republic, according to a statement from his office.
The Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza said that 40 Palestinians had been killed in the fighting so far, and more than 385 people wounded. Three Israelis have been killed. Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, chief of the Israeli military, met with his top commanders and instructed his troops “to continue attacking with full force in the Gaza Strip and to increase the rate of attacks on terrorist targets,” according to a military statement. A senior military official who briefed reporters said Israel had hit nearly 1,000 sites since Wednesday in what he called “intelligence-driven precision strikes,” and described civilian casualties as “regrettable” but unavoidable because the “terrorist infrastructure is embedded inside the population.”
This latest battle between Israel and Hamas, the Islamist militant group that controls Gaza, began Wednesday, when Israel launched airstrikes on Gaza in retaliation for a surge of rocket attacks in recent months from Gaza. The assault has drawn comparisons to Israel’s invasion of Gaza in late 2008, but so far Israeli ground forces have not entered Gaza. Israel’s stated goals for the operation are reclaiming calm for its residents, deterring further rocket attacks and crippling Hamas’s military capabilities. The expansion of the assault to government buildings suggested Israel may be running out of targets relating to the long-range rockets that present the greatest threat, but Mark Regev, Mr. Netanyahu’s spokesman, played down the idea that new attacks represented a shift.
Last week, Israel shifted infantry brigades, authorized the calling up of 75,000 reservists and blocked roads near Gaza, indicating an invasion of the coastal territory was possible. Hamas “makes no distinction between its terrorist military machine and the government structure,” he said. “We have seen Hamas consistently using so-called civilian facilities for the purposes of hiding their terrorist military machine, including weapons.”
The region’s political landscape has also shifted since the war four years ago, with Hamas gaining crucial allies in Egypt, Turkey and Qatar, as well as longer-range, apparently Iranian-made, missiles. While Israeli domestic support for the offensive remained strong, there were the beginnings of an internal debate about when and how to bring the operation to an end.
Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system appears to have successfully intercepted many of the rockets from Gaza. After an attack on Tel Aviv last week, Israel deployed an Iron Dome anti-missile battery near the city, which became operational on Saturday. Yisrael Ziv, a former head of operations for the Israeli military, said Saturday that as the number of targets reachable from the air shrinks, Israel may soon “have to go in on the ground,” but cautioned that move presents greater risks. “A few bad luck incidents can change the whole picture,” he said on Israeli television. “You have to know how far not to go.”
The missiles intercepted one of the Hamas rockets on Saturday evening in the sky above the city, Israeli authorities and witnesses said. But Tzachi Hanegbi, a former chairman of the Israeli Parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, said he thought “we are in a very early stage of the operation,” adding: “I wouldn’t start talking about exit strategies at this point.”
In Cairo, a senior official of the Muslim Brotherhood confirmed that President Morsi was working furiously to secure a cease-fire but insisted that the Israeli side of the talks remained the “sticking point.” The official did not identify a specific issue. The 4 a.m. strike on Mr. Haniyeh’s office was as much a psychological blow as a tactical one. A singed copy of the official Palestinian book of laws lay amid the huge pile of rubble the building was reduced to, along with datebooks and personnel records listing the bank accounts for depositing police officers’ paychecks. Mr. Haniyeh’s gray-bearded face beamed from one page in Hamas’s signature green: the cover of a 2008 booklet declaring “the government’s achievements despite the obstacles.”
While the regional leaders met in various combinations around Cairo, foreign ministers of members of the Arab League met in an emergency closed door meeting to discuss responses to the situation, Egypt’s Foreign Ministry said. Just before 10 a.m., a security official who worked at the building and asked to be identified only as Abu El Abed planted a Palestinian flag in the rubble, declaring, “We will rebuild this place as we have rebuilt others.
President Obama, who has asked President Mohamed Morsi of Egypt to try to mediate the crisis, called Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey on Friday to press for a solution, the White House said. Mr. Erdogan was among the regional leaders meeting in Cairo. “Every structure that is demolished or destroyed is a big loss,” he said. “But the blood of anybody wounded is more important than any structure.”
The Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s powerful Islamist group, called for Mr. Morsi to expel Israel’s ambassador and freeze relations with Israel. Mr. Morsi, a former Brotherhood leader, had already recalled Egypt’s ambassador to Israel. Besides the prime minister’s office and police and security buildings, the military on Saturday bombed smuggling tunnels under Rafah and carried out what it described as pinpoint strikes of Hamas commanders. One such attack flattened the home of Ibrahim Salah, head of public relations for the Hamas Interior Ministry, in the Jabaliya refugee camp, one of the most densely populated areas in the world. Mr. Salah and his family were not in the house, but Hamas officials said the strike wounded 30 neighbors and damaged or destroyed several of the surrounding homes.
In Gaza City, Ghazi Hamad, the deputy foreign minister of Hamas, said Israel’s shift in strategy, attacking Hamas government buildings, would not significantly change the dynamic of the current fighting. Dozens of people, many of them children, swarmed the rubble pile, where clothing and a bottle of detergent sat along with remnants of lights and furnishings. Hassam Al Dadah, 41, loaded a truck with mattresses, blankets, a refrigerator, couch cushions and a child’s doll. Inside the home where he had lived for three years, several women cleared out what was left in the kitchen, taking canisters of rice and coffee and an orange tank of cooking gas, while one stuffed papers from a dust-covered bookcase in a bedroom into a pillowcase.
“Israel has the capacity to destroy all buildings in Gaza, all homes,” he said. “They destroyed our government buildings before many times, but we rebuild again. It’s a long struggle, a long story. It will not stop today or tomorrow.” Mr. Dadah said his five children, three girls and two boys ages 6 to 14, were all being treated for wounds at the hospital, having been covered by debris in their beds when the bomb struck around 6 a.m. The truck packed with belongings was bound for a storage area but Mr. Dadah said he did not know where his family would spend the night.

Jodi Rudoren reported from Gaza, and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem. Reporting was contributed by Fares Akram and Tyler Hicks from Gaza City, and Mayy El Sheikh and David D. Kirkpatrick from Cairo.

“I’m a new refugee,” said Mr. Al Dadah, a teacher at a United Nations school ,who like more than half of Gaza’s 1.5 million people was already classified as a refugee because his family fled the Ashkelon area when Israel became a state in 1948. “I don’t have any place to go to.”

Jodi Rudoren reported from Gaza City and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem. Reporting was contributed by Fares Akram and Tyler Hicks from the Gaza Strip, Carol Sutherland and Iritz Pazner Garshowitz from Jerusalem, and David D. Kirkpatrick and Mayy El Sheikh from Cairo.