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Hamas Extends Rockets’ Range; Dozens of Gaza Strikes by Israel Hamas Extends Rockets’ Range; Dozens of Gaza Strikes by Israel
(about 2 hours later)
JERUSALEM — The military and political confrontation between Hamas and Israel showed no signs of abating Wednesday, with Gaza militants launching more rockets into Israeli territory and the military responding with further airstrikes. JERUSALEM — As new volleys of rockets whizzed toward Israel’s major cities on Wednesday and Israel pressed its intensive air bombardment of Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel vowed to increase “the assault on Hamas and the terrorist organizations in Gaza.”
The Health Ministry in Gaza said the death toll there stood at 53 since Saturday and 45 since Monday, the beginning of Israel’s intensified aerial assaults that its military is calling Operation Protective Edge. But even as Israel’s jets and drones battered targets all across the narrow Mediterranean enclave, the rising Palestinian death toll and increased international alarm suggested Israel would not have the leeway for a military operation on the scale of 2008’s Cast Lead, which lasted three weeks and involved extensive infantry combat in Gaza.
Eighteen children and nine women were among the dead, the Health Ministry in Gaza said. No Israelis have been reported killed. The Israeli government was already facing condemnation and criticism from Jordan, the European Union and President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority as the death toll across Gaza hit at least 53 since Saturday. No Israelis have been reported killed.
At least five rockets were shot down over Tel Aviv early Wednesday, the Israeli Army said, after a barrage of longer-range rockets late Tuesday night hit near major cities like Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, most of them falling harmlessly. One Syrian-made M-302 rocket hit near Hadera, about 70 miles from Gaza, according to an Israeli Army spokesman, Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, who said that Palestinians in Gaza had “tens” more like it. The United States’ support for the Israeli operation also appeared conditional, Israeli analysts said, as Washington called for “restraint from both sides.”
In March, Israel intercepted a ship in the southern Red Sea, 1,000 miles from Israel, that contained a shipment of M-302s, which were said then to have a range of 100 miles. The Israelis asserted the weapons were bound for Gaza and attributed the shipment to Iran, a supporter of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, a militant group that has also fired advanced rockets. Iran and the militants denied the Israeli assertions. Israel and Hamas began this latest round of fighting after a spike in tensions fueled by the abduction and killing of three Israeli teenagers hitchhiking in the West Bank and what is suspected to be the revenge killing of a Palestinian teenager by Israelis.
The Israelis also said Wednesday that they had targeted a senior Islamic Jihad rocket commander, Abdullah Diyfallah, in an airstrike. Another airstrike, which hit a motorcycle in Beit Lahiya, killed Rafiq al-Kafarneh, 30, and seriously wounded another person, according to medics at Kamal Adwan Hospital. At least 29 Palestinians have died since the airstrikes began late Monday night, including, according to some reports, eight children under the age of 16. On Wednesday, after Hamas fired nearly 100 rockets into Israel, Mr. Netanyahu met with senior military commanders near Gaza and vowed to press on. He said that with public support “the operation will be expanded and will continue until the firing at our communities stops and quiet is restored.”
Israel said it hit about 160 targets overnight, including what it called 118 concealed rocket-launching sites, weapons storage facilities, 10 tunnels, six official Hamas facilities and 10 Hamas military command positions. Since Operation Protective Edge began, the army said, it has gone after about 440 targets. Responding to the rising casualties in Gaza, Mr. Abbas said Israel was waging “a war against the Palestinian people in every sense of the word” and accused it of “genocide.” He said he had been in contact with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, who promised to try to restore the cease-fire of 2012 but who has also pointedly not come to the aid of Hamas, which he sees has an adversary.
Israel is also calling up reservists to replace those on duty in the West Bank, to free them for a possible ground invasion of Gaza. The government has authorized the military to call up as many as 40,000 reservists. In a televised speech from Qatar, the Hamas political chief, Khaled Meshal, blamed Israel for the conflict and rejected mediation efforts. “We receive calls from mediators from Arab and Western sides to broker a cease-fire,” he said. “We say to those who ask us for a lull: Go back!”
In Gaza on Wednesday, the mood among residents was grim. “The situation is very difficult,” said Abu Tamer Ajour, speaking on a quiet, nearly deserted Fehmi Bik street in Gaza City. The deadliest single strike of the latest flare-up took place early Wednesday when a missile hit the house in northern Gaza of an Islamic Jihad rocket commander, Abdullah Diyfallah, killing him and five family members. Israeli strikes hit other military figures and their houses, as well as rocket launchers and storage facilities.
“This aggression came at a very bad time, with no salaries, zero economy, no crossings” into Egypt, he said. “But victory will be for the Gaza people and our resistance.” Hamas continued to fire longer-range rockets across Israel, keeping many Israelis at home or in shelters. One Syrian-made M-302 rocket hit near Hadera, about 70 miles from Gaza, according to an Israeli Army spokesman, Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, who said that Palestinians in Gaza had “tens” more like it.
He said that “Gaza cannot endure more escalation, but this is a battle that was imposed on us,” arguing that Israel “always strikes in Gaza and then says we respond to the rockets, but they strike us with and without rockets.” Still, despite the reach of the rockets, Mr. Netanyahu is thought to be reluctant to order a large military operation in Gaza, which could quickly turn bloody for both sides. A ground operation could bring more intense criticism of Israel, as in 2008, for what could be large numbers of Palestinian dead, as Israeli troops fight armed Hamas members who often dress like civilians and live among them. In 2008, 1,400 Palestinians died and fewer than 15 Israelis.
Another resident, Riad Fawzi, pointed to an empty market, with shops closed on Fehmi Bik street, which is normally bustling during the current Ramadan holiday. But Israel then had a more favorable international environment, said Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States until last September. At that time, Israel had made what was considered a serious peace offer to the Palestinians and got credit for it, especially with Washington. Similarly, Mr. Oren said, Israel’s withdrawal of troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005 won it some international praise, and slowed the criticism when Israel went to war in Gaza and southern Lebanon the next year for more than a month.
“The situation is very bad,” he said, “but I don’t expect the conflict will last for long.” He said that “the Jews are not interested in more escalation,” because “we are used to this thing, but they can’t endure the same way we endure.” “But we have no credit now in the international community, and that will play quickly in the United Nations Security Council,” said Mr. Oren, a scholar at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya. “Our air force is much better and very accurate, but inevitably civilians will be hit and the international reaction will be very quick.”
Like many ordinary Gazans, he said he hoped the current fighting would end in an agreement to bring peace and quiet, which would allow better living conditions. “Without a peace deal it will be useless; things will get worse again after a year or two,” he said. “We want a lifting of the siege and a truce and peace with them so our children and we can live.” All that, he said, “is a restraint on a big operation or a prolonged one.” Some in government believe “let’s just get it over with and take the blame in the Security Council because we’ll end up there anyway,” he said, while others are urging more caution, wanting simply to end rocket fire from Gaza while diminishing the power of Hamas.
The show of military strength on both sides illustrated the fragile state of Israeli-Palestinian relations, starting with the collapse of American-sponsored peace talks, the attempts by rival Palestinian factions to form a unity government, the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers and the subsequent kidnapping and murder of a Palestinian teenager. Gerald M. Steinberg, a political scientist at Bar-Ilan University, said that “this is one of those accidental wars,” one from which Mr. Netanyahu “won’t benefit.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his subordinates have emphasized that their goal was to restore quiet to southern Israel, where rockets fired from Gaza had been increasing. But Mr. Netanyahu’s government was also under pressure to conduct a more extensive operation, including ground troops, to destroy a military infrastructure in Gaza rebuilt since Israel’s last campaign there, in 2012. One reason, Mr. Steinberg said, is that after the failure of the extended peace effort by Secretary of State John Kerry, the United States is “seen as exhausted, unable to convince anyone to back off, and Europe is the same.” And the Arab world is in turmoil, he added, undermining the influence of the Arab League.
For its part, Hamas is under pressure from more radical groups in Gaza to show that it could stand up to Israel. An antagonistic military-backed government in Egypt has moved to seal the border with Gaza, sharply reducing Hamas’s tax receipts, and the group also has little to show for its coalition with Fatah, a rival faction that dominates the Palestinian Authority. Now, Hamas appears to have fallen back on its main principle of armed resistance to Israel. As the politicians played to their audiences, the mood of the communities on both sides was somber.
This latest confrontation has roots in the kidnapping and murder last month of the three Israeli teenagers by men in the West Bank who Israel alleges belong to Hamas. That was followed by the kidnapping and murder of the Palestinian teenager, Muhammad Abu Khdeir, reportedly by members of an anti-Arab group of supporters of the Beitar Jerusalem soccer team known as La Familia. Micky Rosenfeld, the Israeli police spokesman, and a lawyer for two of the suspects said Tuesday that they did not know if that was true and that the investigation was continuing. In Kiryat Malachi, in southern Israel near Gaza, Hani Azagvi packed essentials for her small daughters. In 2012, the house next door took a direct hit from a rocket, and she decided this time to go to friends in Nazareth.
The kidnapping and murder of the Israeli teenagers led to a crackdown on Hamas in the West Bank, which in turn appeared to push Hamas to respond from Gaza, which it controls. Achsa Halili, 56, pointing to another family leaving for Hadera, said: “As long as we are here and they are on the other side, there will be no quiet. They think they can be safe in Hadera? There are rockets there, too.”
Palestinian anger over the Israeli airstrikes on Gaza carried over on Wednesday to the United Nations, where the ambassador from the Palestinian Authority, Riyad Mansour, told reporters at a news conference that he had been demanding an emergency meeting of the Security Council to address what he called “this collective punishment taking place against our people.” In Ness Ziona, an orderly suburb south of Tel Aviv, a large chunk of shrapnel from a rocket intercepted in the air by an Israeli missile crashed on tree-lined Weizmann Street, landing between cars in the morning rush hour.
He accused Israel of deliberately bombing Gaza as part of its attempt to fracture the reconciliation government backed by Hamas. Israel has rejected that government and demanded that the Palestinian Authority renounce ties with Hamas, which does not recognize Israel’s right to exist. “There’s a feeling of war,” said Avi Mashiach, 40, who works as a clerk in Ness Ziona’s City Hall. “Israelis want to see the people of Gaza surrender. We should send in more aircraft, tanks and commandos. This is the time to finish Hamas, to destroy them.”
Ron Prosor, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, sought to rebut Mr. Mansour’s accusations in a separate news conference, asserting that Israel was acting purely in self-defense. Mr. Prosor said the Israeli forces had sought to minimize civilian casualties in Gaza, and he accused Hamas operatives of instructing civilians to remain in areas targeted for Israeli bombings. Roi Eliahu, 39, was at the shopping mall trying to amuse his two young children with miniature airplane rides after he and his wife decided it was not safe to send them to their summer day camp.
“No country would accept the threats that Israel faces,” Mr. Prosor said. “We are willing to put up with even a year of sirens as long as they are doing what needs to be done,” he said of the government and the military. “If the army wanted to, it could dismantle Hamas in five hours and flatten Gaza.”
The mood was very different in Gaza and in the West Bank, too. When air-raid sirens sounded over Jerusalem on Tuesday night, there were cheers, applause and shouts of “Allahu akbar!” in East Jerusalem neighborhoods and at the Al-Aksa mosque compound.
“The ball is rolling down, and the third intifada has become unavoidable,” said Mustaser al-Sheikh, a pharmacist in the Qalandia refugee camp near Ramallah. He said that Israel could not win a war against guerrilla fighters supported by a 1.7 million population in Gaza.
“All my friends are celebrating the falling of rockets on the major cities,” he said, referring to the rockets striking Israel.
By day, the refugee camp was calm, but at nightfall, at the end of the day’s fast during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, youths have been throwing stones at the Israeli checkpoints to the south and north of Ramallah and clashing with soldiers.
Muhammad Hammad, who owns a cosmetics store at the Amari refugee camp, which abuts Ramallah, said of the warnings of a new Palestinian uprising, “I know it is coming, but it will be disastrous for us.” If the second intifada that began in 2000 set the Palestinians back 20 years, he said, a third one would set them back double that time.