Hamas targets Tel Aviv as part of rocket barrage

Smoke rises fol­low­ing an Israeli attack on Gaza City Thurs­day. Israel bar­raged the Gaza Strip with airstrikes and shelling Wednes­day and killed the Hamas mil­i­tary chief in a tar­geted strike, launch­ing a cam­paign aimed at stop­ping rocket attacks from Islamic mil­i­tants. The assault killed 10 other Pales­tini­ans, includ­ing two chil­dren and seven mil­i­tants. On Thurs­day, mil­i­tant rock­ets fired into Israel killed three Israelis, rais­ing the like­li­hood of a fur­ther esca­la­tion. (Asso­ci­ated Press | Hatem Moussa)

IBRAHIM BARZAK

KARIN LAUB

Asso­ci­ated Press

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Pales­tin­ian mil­i­tants tar­geted densely pop­u­lated Tel Aviv in Israel’s heart­land with rock­ets for the first time Thurs­day, part of an unprece­dented bar­rage that threat­ened to pro­voke an Israeli ground assault on Gaza. Three Israelis were killed in a sep­a­rate rocket attack in south­ern Israel.

Air raid sirens wailed and pan­icked res­i­dents ran for cover in Tel Aviv, Israel’s com­mer­cial and cul­tural cap­i­tal. Israel responded by mov­ing troops and heavy weapons toward Gaza and autho­riz­ing the call-up of tens of thou­sands of reservists.

There was no word on where the two rock­ets aimed at Tel Aviv landed, rais­ing the pos­si­bil­ity they fell into the Mediter­ranean. A third rocket landed in an open area on the south­ern out­skirts of Tel Aviv.

The fight­ing, the heav­i­est in four years, came after Israel launched a fero­cious air assault Wednes­day to stop repeated rocket fire from Gaza. The pow­er­ful Hamas mil­i­tary chief was killed in that strike, and another 18 Pales­tini­ans have died over two days, includ­ing five chil­dren. Some 100 Pales­tini­ans have been wounded.

Israeli war­planes struck dozens of Hamas-linked tar­gets in Gaza on Thurs­day, send­ing loud booms echo­ing across the nar­row Mediter­ranean coastal strip at reg­u­lar inter­vals, fol­lowed by gray columns of smoke. After night­fall, sev­eral explo­sions shook Gaza City sev­eral min­utes apart, a sign the strikes were not let­ting up, and the mil­i­tary said the tar­gets were about 70 under­ground rocket-launching sites.

Israeli Prime Min­is­ter Ben­jamin Netanyahu said the army was hit­ting Hamas hard with what he called sur­gi­cal strikes, and warned of a “sig­nif­i­cant widen­ing” of the Gaza oper­a­tion. Israel will “con­tinue to take what­ever action is nec­es­sary to defend our peo­ple,” said Netanyahu, who is up for re-election in January.

There were mount­ing signs of a ground oper­a­tion. At least 12 trucks were seen trans­port­ing tanks and armored per­son­nel car­ri­ers toward Gaza late Thurs­day, and a num­ber of buses car­ry­ing sol­diers arrived. Israeli TV sta­tions said a Gaza incur­sion was expected on Fri­day, though mil­i­tary offi­cials said no deci­sion had been made.

Defense Min­is­ter Ehud Barak said he autho­rized the call-up of reservists, and the army said up to 30,000 addi­tional troops could be drafted.

“We will con­tinue the attacks and we will increase the attacks, and I believe we will obtain our objec­tives,” said Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, Israel’s mil­i­tary chief.

Hamas, mean­while, warned it would strike deeper inside Israel with Iranian-made Fajr-5 rock­ets, acknowl­edg­ing for the first time it has such longer-range weapons capa­ble of hit­ting tar­gets some 47 miles (75 kilo­me­ters) away. Tel Aviv is 40 miles (70 kilo­me­ters) from Gaza.

By night­fall Thurs­day, Hamas said it had fired more than 350 rock­ets into Israel. Israel, which esti­mates Gaza mil­i­tants have as many as 12,000 rock­ets, said some 220 rock­ets struck the Jew­ish state and another 130 were inter­cepted by an anti-missile shield.

Israel believes Hamas has sig­nif­i­cantly boosted its arse­nal since the last Gaza war four years ago, includ­ing with weapons from Iran and from Libyan stock­piles plun­dered after the 2011 fall of the regime there.

“After four years, we became stronger, we have a strat­egy and we became united with all the mil­i­tary wings in Gaza,” said Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum, refer­ring to Hamas’ set­backs dur­ing Israel’s last major offen­sive in late 2008.

In the cur­rent round of fight­ing, Israel is fac­ing an embold­ened Hamas with a stronger arse­nal and greater regional back­ing. Egypt­ian Pres­i­dent Mohammed Morsi, like Hamas a mem­ber of the region-wide Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, said he was send­ing a high-level del­e­ga­tion to Gaza on Fri­day in a show of sup­port for the fel­low Islamists there.

Both Israel and Hamas had largely observed an infor­mal truce over the last four years, marred by occa­sional flare-ups. In recent days, how­ever, bor­der ten­sions esca­lated, then exploded into major vio­lence Wednes­day when Israel assas­si­nated Hamas’ secre­tive mil­i­tary chief, Ahmed Jabari, with a mis­sile strike on his car.

Jabari led Hamas’ 2007 takeover of the ter­ri­tory, turn­ing small squads of Hamas gun­men into a fight­ing force and super­vis­ing Gaza’s fledg­ling arms indus­try, includ­ing rocket pro­duc­tion. He was long No. 1 on Israel’s most-wanted list, par­tic­u­larly for his role in cap­tur­ing Israeli Sgt. Gilad Schalit and hold­ing him for more than five years.

On Thurs­day, Hamas gun­men fired machine guns in the air as fren­zied mourn­ers car­ried Jabari’s body, wrapped in a white bur­ial shroud, through the streets of Gaza City on a wooden stretcher. At the ceme­tery, young men surged toward the corpse, try­ing to touch Jabari’s face before he was low­ered into the grave in a chaotic scene.

Hamas’ top lead­ers have dropped out of sight since the assas­si­na­tion, but it was not clear if they would be tar­gets. The Hamas prime min­is­ter, Ismail Haniyeh, said in a tele­vised speech Thurs­day that the group “will not for­get and not for­give” the killing of Jabari.

Late Thurs­day, Hamas secu­rity said an Israeli navy ves­sel fired toward a build­ing about 50 yards (meters) from Haniyeh’s house, where a gen­er­a­tor sup­plies elec­tric­ity for the prime min­is­ter and his neigh­bors in Shati, a beach-front refugee camp in Gaza City. It was not clear if Haniyeh was home at the time.

In Israel, a rocket hit a four-story apart­ment build­ing in the south­ern town of Kiryat Malachi on Thurs­day, killing two men and a preg­nant woman. A 4-year-old boy and two babies were wounded in the attack.

Many Gazans stayed indoors and streets were largely empty, though there was no sense of wide­spread panic. Some said Hamas should take revenge, even at the price of fur­ther Israeli retaliation.

“If Israel strikes us, we have to strike back,” said Ahmed Barakat, a 33-year-old laborer from Gaza City attend­ing the Jabari funeral. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”

In Jerusalem, thou­sands of mourn­ers attended the funeral of Mira Scharf, a 26-year-old mother of three who was killed in Thursday’s rocket strike in Israel. Israeli media said she was preg­nant and had recently returned to Israel from New Delhi to give birth.

In cen­tral Tel Aviv, Adrian Cisser, a 35-year-old elec­tri­cian, was in a bicy­cle shop when an air raid siren went off.

“Peo­ple on the street started run­ning,” he said. “The pub­lic shel­ter nearby was locked so we just stayed in the shop, and two min­utes after it started we heard this big bang.”

Cisser said he had got­ten a pre­lim­i­nary call from the army and expects to be called up for reserve duty next week.

In the south­ern Tel Aviv sub­urb of Ris­hon Lezion, where a Hamas rocket landed in an empty field, a siren sent peo­ple rush­ing for shelter.

“There is panic in our house and we can hear shouts from the street,” a res­i­dent who gave her first name, Lital, told the Israeli news site YNet. “Chil­dren were run­ning away, try­ing to find shel­ter. It was very stress­ful. I am shaken up.”

From Israel’s per­spec­tive, Hamas esca­lated the fight­ing with a pair of attacks in recent days, an explo­sion in a tun­nel along the Israeli bor­der and a mis­sile attack on an Israeli mil­i­tary jeep that seri­ously wounded four soldiers.

An Israeli ground offen­sive could be costly to both sides. In the last Gaza war, Israel dev­as­tated large areas of the ter­ri­tory, set­ting back Hamas’ fight­ing capa­bil­i­ties but also pay­ing the price of increas­ing diplo­matic iso­la­tion because of the high civil­ian casu­alty toll.

The cur­rent round of fight­ing is rem­i­nis­cent of the first days of Israel’s three-week offen­sive against Hamas that began in Decem­ber 2008. At the time, Israel also caught Hamas off-guard with a bar­rage of mis­sile strikes and threat­ened to fol­low up with a ground offensive.

How­ever, much has also changed since then.

Israel has improved its mis­sile defense sys­tems, but is fac­ing a more heav­ily armed Hamas.

Netanyahu, who has clashed even with his allies over the dead­lock in Mideast peace efforts, appears to have less diplo­matic lee­way than his pre­de­ces­sor, Ehud Olmert, mak­ing a pro­tracted mil­i­tary offen­sive harder to sustain.

The White House came out in sup­port of Israel on Thurs­day, with spokesman Jay Car­ney say­ing there is “no jus­ti­fi­ca­tion” for rocket fire from Gaza and urg­ing mil­i­tants to stop “cow­ardly acts.”

How­ever, the regional con­stel­la­tion has changed dra­mat­i­cally since the last Gaza war. Hamas has emerged from its polit­i­cal iso­la­tion as its par­ent move­ment, the region-wide Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, rose to power in sev­eral coun­tries in the wake of last year’s Arab Spring upris­ings, par­tic­u­larly in Egypt.

On Thurs­day, the Egypt­ian pres­i­dent ordered his prime min­is­ter, Hes­ham Kandil, to lead a senior del­e­ga­tion to Gaza on Fri­day in a show of sup­port for Hamas. Morsi has called Israel’s cam­paign against Hamas “unac­cept­able” and has recalled Egypt’s ambas­sador to Israel in protest.

Posted by AP News on Nov 15 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.