‘We will strike Hamas everywhere’

Israel sensed the chance of a knockout victory in its fight against Hamas on Tuesday after a stunning air strike claimed the lives of an unprecedented number of the group’s foot soldiers in its Gaza stronghold.

Fourteen members of Hamas’s armed wing, the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades, were killed in the early-morning strike on a football pitch in eastern Gaza where they were undergoing military training.

The attack was Israel’s first major response to a double Hamas suicide bombing in the southern city of Beersheva last week that left 16 Israelis dead, as well as the two bombers.

Hamas answered with routine vows of revenge but Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said the army could ”beat” the Jewish state’s arch-enemies.

Israel is expected to pull all of its troops and the 8 000 Jewish settlers out of the Gaza Strip by the end of next year, but is desperate to avoid seeing Hamas emerge as the leading force in the territory after the withdrawal.

”We have been acting systematically for a long time to hit the maximum number of Hamas members,” Olmert told reporters. ”We are interested in beating Hamas.”

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s chief spokesperson pledged that there will be no let-up in the campaign against Hamas, again threatening the movement’s senior cadres who are based in the Syrian capital, Damascus.

”We will strike Hamas everywhere — in Gaza, in Damascus — in order to avoid the assassinations of Israelis,” Raanan Gissin said. ”This organisation does not want to negotiate but destroy the state of Israel and kill Jews.”

Khaled Meshaal, the organisation’s Damascus-based politburo chief and overall leader, is thought to be top of the list of targets.

Israeli agents botched an assassination bid back in 1997 when Meshaal was in Jordan.

Meshaal became undisputed leader after the assassination of Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and his successor, Abdelaziz Rantissi, in Israeli air strikes in Gaza City in the spring.

But while targeted air strikes against the Hamas leadership have long been a feature of Israel’s campaign of attacks against the organisation, Tuesday’s raid is thought to be the first to wipe out such a large number of Hamas fighters in a single strike.

Gissin said that the possibility of an attack on the field used as a training ground for members of Hamas’s military wing had been studied for some time.

”Before we hit this football pitch we watched for a few weeks in order to wait for the right moment to strike,” he said.

”It was not a football field but a killing field where they were training in the use of explosives and attacks against Israelis.”

Israel has been painting parallels between its fight against Palestinian militants and Russia’s battle with Chechen rebels in the wake of last week’s hostage drama at a school in the town of Beslan that left more than 300 people dead.

”If you want a justification of our action yesterday, switch on your television set and watch the pictures from Beslan. We won’t allow this horror to happen here.”

The army said that the location of the air strike, the Sheikh Ahmed Yassin ground, had been identified ”as a gathering field of Hamas terrorists”.

The fighters were being trained to plant and detonate explosives, launch rocket-propelled grenades and makeshift rockets and infiltrate Israeli settlements.

”Trainings for different scenarios, including taking control of a car, were carried out at the training field recently, as a part of the preparation to kidnap Israeli civilians and soldiers,” the army said in a statement. — Sapa-AFP