Israel hits Hamas hub

Jerusalem, Nov. 17: Israel retaliated after Palestinian rocket attacks on Tel Aviv and Jerusalem with airstrikes before dawn today on the Gaza City offices of Prime Minister Ismail Haniya of Hamas ? the militant Islamist group that governs Gaza.

The Israeli military said today that it had struck more than 200 targets overnight, including underground rocket launchers and smuggling tunnels in Rafah, on the Gaza-Egypt border.

Along with Haniya?s headquarters, which was destroyed, the Israeli military said that it struck the police and homeland security headquarters of Hamas, as well as the house of a Hamas commander, Ahmed Randor.

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?.

?We have seen Hamas consistently using so-called civilian facilities for the purposes of hiding their terrorist military machine, including weapons,? Regev said.

About 30 rockets were fired from Gaza into southern Israel this morning, one landing in the yard of a house. Three soldiers were slightly injured by one of the rockets, the Israeli military said.

Hamas said seven of its members were killed this morning in two separate attacks ? four in Rafah, and three in the Al Maghazi refugee camp, in the middle of the Gaza Strip. Despite the fighting, foreign minister Rafik Abdessalem of Tunisia visited Gaza today, condemning the Israeli attacks during an appearance at the Al Shifa hospital.

?Israel has to understand that there is an international law and it has to respect the international law to stop the aggression against the Palestinian people,? Abdessalem said, according to The Associated Press.

Yesterday, emboldened by displays of Egyptian solidarity and undeterred by Israel?s advanced aerial firepower, Palestinian militants under siege in Gaza broadened their rocket targets, aiming at Jerusalem for the first time, sending a second volley screeching toward Tel Aviv and pushing the Israelis closer to a ground invasion.

Israel?s government more than doubled the number of army reservists it could call to combat if needed in the increasingly lethal showdown in Gaza with Hamas fighters and their affiliates, after they fired more than 700 rockets into southern Israel over the last year. The escalation has raised fears of a new chapter of war in the intractable Arab-Israeli conflict.

The Israeli military closed some roads adjacent to Gaza in anticipation of a possible infantry move into the territory, which would be the first Israeli military presence on the ground in Gaza since the three-week invasion of 2008-9.

Many residents of Jerusalem, which Israel claims as its capital despite objections from the city?s large Palestinian population and others throughout West Asia, were startled yesterday when wartime sirens warning of impending danger sounded at dusk, followed by at least two dull thuds.

Hamas?s military wing claimed in a statement that they were rockets fired from Gaza, 48 miles away, and had been meant to hit the Israeli parliament.

The police said one rocket crashed harmlessly in an open area near an Israeli settlement south of Jerusalem. It was unclear where the others landed, but no damage or injuries were reported.

Earlier in Tel Aviv, 40 miles from the Gaza border, air-raid sirens wailed for a second day as a rocket fired from the territory approached. A police spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld, said it apparently fell into the Mediterranean.

Although the rockets missed their intended targets, the launchings aimed at Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, the two biggest population centres, underscored the ability and willingness of Hamas rocket teams to target Israeli or Israeli-occupied areas that up until the past few days had been thought relatively immune.

Source: http://www.telegraphindia.com/1121118/jsp/foreign/story_16208529.jsp

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