Israel blitzed Gaza from the air overnight, setting the interior ministry ablaze and killing a Palestinian fighter in the latest offensive aimed at freeing a soldier held by Palestinian militants.
As the international community appealed for restraint to prevent an escalation of the conflict, Egypt said on Friday the ruling Hamas movement had agreed to secure the release of the soldier, but that Israel had so far not agreed to the conditions.
Israel stepped up its assault on Gaza overnight, causing the first Palestinian casualties since it launched a ground offensive early on Wednesday, its biggest military operation since pulling out of the territory in September.
Israel pounded Gaza with 30 air raids, hitting the Hamas-run interior ministry, weapons depots, Hamas training camps and access roads, after suspending plans to send ground troops into the north of the territory.
It further ratcheted up the pressure on the Palestinian leadership by revoking the Jerusalem residency rights of a Hamas minister and three MPs, leaving them faced with expulsion from the occupied eastern sector of the city.
Israeli troops had rounded up scores of Hamas members the day before, including eight ministers — a third of the Palestinian cabinet — and lawmakers in a vast sweep condemned by Hamas as a declaration of “open war”.
The Palestinian Interior Ministry issued a statement on Friday condemning what it called Israel’s “growing barbaric aggression” against the “defenceless Palestinian people, their institutions and infrastructure”.
A fighter from the hard-line group Islamic Jihad, which has been behind almost all bomb attacks against Israel over the past year, was killed in one of the Gaza air strikes.
The army said it had struck at militants who tried to fire an anti-tank missile at Israeli troops based around the disused Palestinian airport in Dahaniyeh in the southern Gaza Strip.
Another Palestinian was shot dead during an Israeli arrest operation in the West Bank on Friday.
Three members of the armed al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, linked to Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party, were also injured in a shootout with Israeli troops in northern Gaza, Palestinian medical sources said.
However, the army denied there had been a shootout.
Israel had called a halt on Thursday to a planned incursion into the northern Gaza Strip amid international appeals for diplomatic efforts to free 19-year-old Gilad Shalit, seized in an attack on an army post on Sunday.
Israeli media said the delay was because of differences between Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and the army chief of staff over how to proceed in the worst crisis since Hamas took office in March after a shock election win.
The best-selling Yediot Aharonot newspaper said Olmert, who had warned he was prepared to take “extreme measures” to bring back Shalit, believed the operation would cause too many civilian casualties as well as heavy Israeli losses in one of the world’s most-densely populated areas.
An opinion poll by Yediot Aharonot also revealed that 53% of Israelis considered “negotiation and international pressure” the best option for bringing Shalit home, while only 43% favour military activity.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said in comments published on Friday that Hamas has agreed to secure Shalit’s release, on certain conditions.
“The movement has accepted, conditionally, to have the Israeli soldier returned as soon as possible to avoid an escalation,” Mubarak said in an interview with the government newspaper Al-Ahram.
“Up to now, the Israeli side does not accept,” he added, but gave no details of the Palestinian conditions. “I am personally deploying all possible efforts, late into the night, to avoid a real catastrophe, which would scorch the whole region.”
On Monday three Palestinian groups, including the armed wing of Hamas, called for the release of all Palestinian women and children from Israeli jails in exchange for information on the soldier.
Also on Thursday, the body of a Jewish settler kidnapped by gunmen was found dumped in the West Bank, adding to the tensions.
But the international community, led by United Nations chief Kofi Annan, has issued urgent appeals for all sides to show restraint, and to prevent the crisis spreading across the region.
“We hope that Israel, in trying to retrieve its soldier, will practise restraint and that both sides will practise restraint in trying to lower the temperature and develop a sense of security in the future,” said White House spokesperson Tony Snow.
Meeting in Moscow, foreign ministers of the group of eight of industrialised nations called on Israel to exercise the “utmost restraint”.
New York-based watchdog Human Rights Watch said the militants’ attempts to use the captured soldier as a bargaining counter amounted to a “war crime.”
But it added that Israel “must minimise the harm to Gaza’s civilian population during any military operation to rescue the corporal, and that includes not destroying vital power plants”.
Many parts of Gaza, already facing a dire humanitarian crisis because of a cut in Western aid since Hamas took office, are without electricity and water because of Israeli air strikes.
Defence Minister Amir Peretz has insisted that Israel, which has a force of about 5Â 000 troops massed on the border, had no intention of retaking Gaza, where about 1,4-million mostly impoverished Palestinians live.
But Israel has also issued warnings to Syria, accusing it of sheltering wanted Hamas militants, raising fears the conflict could spread across the region. — AFP