Israel battered the Gaza Strip with fresh air strikes on Tuesday as troops stood poised to launch more incursions in a deadly offensive that has killed more than 50 Palestinians in a week.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert defended the operation, aimed at securing the release of an abducted teenage soldier and halting rocket attacks, despite widespread international criticism that the assault has been disproportionate.
A Palestinian security officer was killed and six people were wounded in the latest Israeli air strikes hitting northern Gaza, medical sources said, as the punishing aerial campaign moved into a third week since the soldier’s capture.
The raids — which the Israeli military said targeted rockets and a “cell about to launch them” — came just one day after nine Palestinians died from Israeli fire around the impoverished and radicalised Gaza Strip.
The dead man was named as Ahmed Shahid. Medics said he was struck by a missile fired towards a car. The army said the attack targeted a vehicle used to reach a rocket-launch site and loaded with rockets in the Beit Hanun area.
The local head of al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, Abu Ghazal, was in the targeted vehicle but managed to escape unharmed, said a spokesperson for the group, an offshoot of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement.
A 12-year-old boy who was wounded in an air strike on July 6 died of his wounds, bringing to 52 the number of Palestinians killed in the operation, on top of one Israeli soldier who was killed by friendly fire during clashes.
Despite the mounting death toll, defence sources said the government has given the military authority to continue, and if necessary, intensify the offensive, with infantry and armour poised to carry out “in-depth” incursions.
Approval was granted during consultations late on Monday between Olmert and Defence Minister Amir Peretz.
Troops are still massed on the eastern and northern borders of the densely populated Gaza Strip, as well as stationed east of Gaza City and in the south near a defunct airport.
Olmert was on Tuesday to confer again with military commanders to discuss the offensive, the largest operation since Israel pulled out of Gaza last September.
The prime minister has refused to negotiate with Hamas or free Palestinian prisoners in exchange for 19-year-old Corporal Gilad Shalit, vowing the assault will continue “in places, in time, in measures” at Israel’s convenience.
Khaled Meshaal, the exiled political chief of Hamas, which formed a Palestinian government last March, insists the captured soldier at the heart of the crisis will not be freed without a swap for prisoners jailed in Israel.
“I think that once the Qassam [rocket] shooting will be stopped and the terrorist actions against innocent civilians will be halted altogether, there will be no need for any Israeli action in Gaza,” Olmert said.
Aid groups have expressed concern about the difficulties of providing assistance to 1,4-million people living in Gaza following months of financial crisis and the suspension of direct Western aid to the Hamas-led government.
The European Commission announced on Tuesday it was sending emergency fuel supplies to Gaza through an international mechanism set up to meet basic Palestinian needs after the West cut direct aid to the Hamas-led government.
The fuel, the first aid to flow through the mechanism, was sent to public hospitals for use in generators after the Israeli air force last week destroyed electricity transformers at the only power plant in the territory.
Israel has said its troops are likely to be in for the long haul, but denied that the offensive aimed to topple the Hamas-led government, boycotted by the West and whose offices have been directly targeted in the operation.
Hamas’s armed wing claims to be holding the soldier, along with two other militant groups, the Popular Resistance Committees and the Army of Islam, since the conscript was abducted during an attack on an army post on June 25.
Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was due to arrive in the region on Tuesday for separate talks with Olmert and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas on a trip he hopes will help calm tensions. — AFP