Israeli warplanes pounded Gaza for a second straight night as Palestinian militants holding an army corporal issued new demands on Saturday for the release of prisoners from Israeli jails.
The regional fallout of the crisis also deepened, with Washington backing its key ally in holding arch foe Syria at least partially responsible for the escalation.
Israeli commanders said that the fresh wave of air strikes targeted seven potential escape routes for the soldier’s captors in a bid to prevent them moving him from the southern Gaza Strip where is currently believed to be held.
The three militant groups that seized Corporal Gilad Shalit six days ago in the Gaza Strip demanded that Israel free 1 OOO prisoners, hours after Israeli television reported the conscript was alive and had received medical treatment.
The Popular Resistance Committees, the armed wing of the governing Hamas movement, and the previously unknown Army of Islam demanded the release of ”1 000 Palestinian, Arab, Muslim and other prisoners”.
Their statement did not explicitly specify that the releases were conditions for securing the freedom of 19-year-old Shalit, who was seized in a raid on an army post on the Israel-Gaza border.
The three groups said all the detained leaders of Palestinian movements as well as elderly and sick detainees should be freed and reiterated an earlier demand for the release of women and juvenile prisoners from Israeli jails.
The statement also urged Israel to end its military reprisals in the Palestinian territories.
Israeli tanks and troops on the ground continued to observe the halt to further operations, which the government ordered on Thursday to allow space for diplomatic efforts to secure the soldier’s release.
Egypt, which is trying to broker a way out of the crisis, said on Friday that Hamas had agreed to secure the release of the soldier but that Israel had not agreed to the conditions, which it did not specify.
On Friday, the ruling Hamas party called for an end to Israel’s offensive after a first night of air strikes against the interior ministry and militant targets.
In New York, the United Nations Security Council debated the crisis with Palestinian and Israeli representatives and their allies trading barbs.
”We would not be where we are right now if it were not for Syria’s support and harbouring of terrorists,” US ambassador John Bolton said.
Bolton pressed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to turn over for prosecution Khaled Meshaal, Hamas’s exiled political leader, who lives in Damascus.
”In addition, we call upon Syria to stop financing the terrorists and stop cooperating with other states, such as Iran, which finance terrorists,” Bolton said.
As the UN Security Council debated the crisis, Hamas said it was working towards freeing the soldier but vowed that the ”barbaric aggression” by Israel would not topple its administration.
”We are working to end this crisis but the aggression must stop and the siege has to be lifted,” the movement’s Prime Minister Ismail Haniya said in his first public comments on the crisis.
Thursday night’s air strikes caused the first Palestinian casualties since Israel launched a ground offensive for the missing soldier early on Wednesday, its biggest military operation since pulling out of Gaza in September 2005.
A fighter from the hard-line Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement was killed in an air strike, while another militant from the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, linked to Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party, was shot dead in the West Bank.
Israeli police denied claims by the radical al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades on Saturday that a second Israeli soldier had been snatched and would be killed unless Israel ended its military offensive in the Palestinian territories.
”After police examination of this matter it has been established that he is safe and sound and on holiday abroad,” a police spokesman told Agence France-Presse.
Israel further ratcheted up the pressure on the Palestinian leadership on Friday by revoking the Jerusalem residency rights of a Hamas minister and three MPs, meaning their likely expulsion from the occupied east of the city.
Israeli troops rounded up scores of Hamas members in a massive West Bank sweep the day before, including eight ministers — a third of the Palestinian Cabinet — and 24 MPs.
Haniya accused Israel of planning ”open war” but vowed it would not topple his government, which took office in March but is boycotted politically and financially by the West.
Israel’s offensive — and a perceived lack of action by world leaders — has drawn fierce criticism in the Arab world.
”This crazy adventure will light more than one big fire instead of containing a small issue over the abduction of the Israeli soldier,” read an editorial in Egypt’s state-owned Al-Ahram. — AFP
