These were the first casualties on the
Israeli side since Israel launched its campaign, the most ferocious assault on
Gaza in four years in response to persistent Palestinian rocket fire.
A rocket on Thursday smashed into the top
floor of an apartment building in Kiryat Malachi, about 15 miles north of Gaza.
Two women and a man were killed, according to rescue officials. A baby was
among the injured and several Israelis were hospitalized with shrapnel wounds
after rockets hit other southern cities and towns, they said.
In Gaza, the death toll rose to 11 as
Israel pummeled what the military described as medium- and long-range rocket
and infrastructure sites and struck rocket-launching squads. The military said
it had dispersed leaflets over Gaza warning residents to stay away from Hamas
operatives and facilities, suggesting that more was to come.
Three Gaza militants were killed when
Israeli missiles hit their motorcycles in the southern Gaza town of Khan
Younis. Palestinian security officials said they were most likely members of
the Hamas military wing. Overnight, the body of a man, 65, was recovered from
an open area that had been struck in the center of the Gaza Strip.
Five other civilians, including a baby and
a 7-year-old girl, have been killed in Gaza since the operation began and at
least 70 have been wounded, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza.
The Israeli offensive opened with the
killing of the top military commander of Hamas. It has damaged Israel’s fragile
relations with Egypt and escalated the risks of a new war in the Middle East.
The Israel Defense Forces coupled the
intense airstrikes with the threat of a ground invasion of Gaza, recalling its
three-week operation in the winter of 2008-9, shifting infantry brigades and
calling up some specialist reserves. The Israelis also warned all Hamas leaders
in Gaza to stay out of sight or risk the same fate as the Hamas military
commander, Ahmed al-Jabari, who was killed in a pinpoint airstrike on Wednesday
as he was riding in a car on a Gaza street.
“We recommend that no Hamas operatives, whether low level or senior
leaders, show their faces above ground in the days ahead,” the Israel Defense
Forces said in a Twitter message. Brig. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, the military
spokesman, said, “If I were a senior Hamas activist, I would look for a place
to hide.”
The escalation in hostilities between
Israel and Hamas, the militant organization regarded by Israel as a terrorist
group sworn to its destruction, prompted Egypt to recall its ambassador on
Wednesday and demand meetings of the United Nations Security Council and the
Arab League.
Israel had already been facing growing
tensions with its Arab neighbors. It has confronted lawlessness on its frontier
with Egypt in the Sinai Peninsula, including cross-border attacks. In the last
week, the military twice fired into Syria, which is engulfed in a civil war,
after mortar rounds fell in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, and southern
Israel has been struck by more than 750 rockets fired from Gaza this year. The
rockets have hit homes, caused injuries and frightened the population.
On Saturday, Gaza militants fired an
antitank missile at an Israeli Army jeep patrolling the Israel-Gaza border,
injuring four soldiers.
Both the rocket fire and the buildup of
advanced weaponry in Gaza have increasingly tested Israeli officials and
prompted such an intense response, according to military experts in Israel.
“Deterrence has to be maintained,” said Gabi Siboni, a colonel in the
reserves who leads the military and strategic affairs program at the Institute
for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. “It was only a question of time
until this moment arrived.”
The ferocity of the airstrikes provoked
rage in Gaza, where Hamas said the campaign amounted to war and promised a
harsh response. It quickly launched dozens of rockets into the south but
Israel’s Iron Dome anti-rocket defense system managed to intercept many of them
high above the ground.
Civil defense authorities in Israel,
anticipating retaliation, had instructed residents within a 25-mile radius of
Gaza not to go to school or work on Thursday. Many remained indoors or
congregated in bomb shelters.
General Mordechai said the operation “would
continue and grow.” The military said it was designed to “severely impair the
command and control chain of the Hamas leadership.”
By targeting Mr. Jabari, 52, the Israelis
said they had killed the mastermind of virtually every attack to come from Gaza
in recent years, including the kidnapping in 2006 of the Israeli soldier Gilad
Shalit. Mr. Jabari was involved in the negotiations to release Mr. Shalit,
whose five years as a prisoner marked a period national anguish. When he was finally
released through Egypt, Mr. Jabari made a rare public appearance alongside him.
The attacks on Gaza were undertaken at a
delicate time for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, nine weeks
before elections, and may have partly reflected his administration’s own sense
that it needed to send a message of deterrence beyond Gaza. In a statement, Mr.
Netanyahu praised the military for the operation and said: “We will not accept
a situation in which Israeli citizens are threatened by the terror of rockets.
No country would accept this.”
The Israeli journalist Barak Ravid wrote on
the Haaretz Web site that Mr. Jabari was Mr. Netanyahu’s Osama bin Laden.
In Washington, the White House issued a
carefully worded statement saying President Obama had spoken with both Mr.
Netanyahu and President Mohamed Morsi of Egypt, reiterating to both that the
United States supports Israel’s right to self-defense from the rocket attacks.
The statement said Mr. Obama had urged Mr. Netanyahu to “make every effort to
avoid civilian casualties,” and that Mr. Obama and Mr. Morsi “had agreed on the
importance of working to de-escalate the situation as quickly as possible.”
Nonetheless, the Israeli attacks further
complicated Israel’s fragile relations with Egypt, where the Islamist-led
government of Mr. Morsi, reversing a policy of his ousted predecessor, Hosni
Mubarak, had established closer ties with Hamas and had been acting as a
mediator to restore calm between Israel and Gaza-based militant groups.
In the first crisis in Israeli-Egyptian
relations since Mr. Morsi came to power, he called the Israeli actions “wanton
aggression on the Gaza Strip” in justifying his decision to summon home the
ambassador.
Egyptian state news media said Foreign
Minister Mohamed Amr had “warned Israel against the consequences of escalation
and the negative reflections it may have on the security and stability of the
region.”
Mr. Morsi’s Freedom and Justice Party,
rooted in the same Muslim Brotherhood origins as Hamas, posted a video on its
Web site of what was described as the burned body of a Palestinian child said
to have been killed in the Israeli attacks, in an attempt to stoke anger at
Israel. His party also issued a statement saying: “The wanton aggression
against Gaza proves that Israel has yet to realize that Egypt has changed and
that the Egyptian people who revolted against oppression will not accept
assaulting Gaza.”
A spokesman for Hamas, Fawzi Barhoum, said
the Israelis had “committed a dangerous crime and broke all redlines,” and that
“the Israeli occupation will regret and pay a high price.”
Military officials in Israel, which took
credit for killing Mr. Jabari, said their forces had carried out additional
airstrikes in Gaza targeting what they described as “a significant number of
long-range rocket sites” operated by Hamas that had stored rockets capable of
reaching 25 miles into Israel. The statement said the airstrikes had dealt a
“significant blow to the terror organization’s underground rocket-launching
capabilities.”
The Israel Defense Forces said Mr. Jabari
had been targeted because he “served in the upper echelon of the Hamas command
and was directly responsible for executing terror attacks against the state of
Israel in the past number of years.”
A video released by the Israel Defense
Forces and posted on YouTube showed an aerial view of the attack on what it
identified as Mr. Jabari’s car on a Gaza street as it was targeted and
instantly blown up in a pinpoint bombing. The Israel Defense Forces later
posted a Twitter message showing a mug shot of Mr. Jabari overwritten by the
word “eliminated.”
Mr. Jabari led Hamas forces when they took
control of Gaza in 2007, ousting the rival Palestinian faction Fatah and the
Palestinian Authority two years after the Israelis withdrew from the territory
which was captured in the 1967 war.
Israeli forces went back into Gaza in the
winter of 2008-9 after years of rocket attacks by Palestinian militants into
Israel. The Israeli invasion killed as many as 1,400 Palestinians, including
hundreds of civilians, and was widely condemned internationally.
Since then, Hamas has mostly adhered to an
informal, if shaky, cease-fire and at times tried to force smaller militant
groups to stick to it, too. But in recent months, under pressure from some of
the Gaza population for not avenging deadly Israeli airstrikes, Hamas has
claimed responsibility for participating in the firing of rockets.
Mr. Jabari once belonged to Fatah, the
mainstream nationalist movement, but joined Hamas while serving time in an
Israeli prison. After Hamas took over Gaza, Mr. Jabari became the architect of
the Hamas military there, organizing the forces into companies, battalions and
brigades, Israeli experts said.
Married to two wives and the father of 14
children, Mr. Jabari was born in eastern Gaza City. A Hamas militant who worked
closely with him, and who goes by the nom de guerre Abu Dujana, described him
as “extraordinarily religious, to the point of refusing to do things that are
normal, like watching an unveiled anchorwoman on television.”
Abu Dujana said that he last saw Mr. Jabari
last month in Mecca, where he was performing the hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage.
He described Mr. Jabari as stubborn and uncompromising.
Lt. Col. Avital Leibovich, a spokeswoman
for the Israeli military, said Mr. Jabari had “a lot of blood on his hands.”
Isabel Kershner reported from Jerusalem,
and Fares Akram from Gaza. Reporting was contributed by Rina Castelnuovo from
Kiryat Malachi, Israel; Mayy El Sheikh and David D. Kirkpatrick from Cairo;
Gabby Sobelman from Jerusalem; Rick Gladstone from New York; and Alan Cowell
from Paris.
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