Five Palestinians were killed on Friday as Israel pressed on with its bloody offensive in Gaza, a day after reoccupying land in the deadliest 24 hours in the Palestinian territories for four years.
Israeli artillery and aircraft pounded a neighbourhood in the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Lahiya for a second day. Twenty-seven Palestinians and one Israeli soldier have been killed since the offensive began late on Wednesday.
Faced with the mounting death toll and the worst Middle East crisis in months, the United Nations Security Council debated a draft resolution demanding Israel withdraw from Gaza immediately and release detained Palestinian officials.
But the United States, Israel’s closest ally, described the text as ”unbalanced” and troops continued their ground assault aimed at securing the release of a soldier captured by Palestinian militants 12 days ago.
Two Palestinians were killed by an Israeli air strike in the al-Atatra area of Beit Lahiya, which has been the scene of the deadliest fighting and attacks over the last two days. The army said the raid had attacked ”two armed cells”.
A Palestinian teenager, a deaf man and a gunman were similarly killed by Israeli tank and air fire in the same spot, medical and security officials said.
In the occupied West Bank, another Palestinian militant was shot dead in clashes with Israeli forces in Nablus, where radicals have threatened to unleash untold violence should Israel move further into Gaza.
In the biggest escalation of the crisis since the soldier was abducted, Israel on Thursday sent troops deep into the northern Gaza Strip, effectively creating a buffer zone in a territory it withdrew from in September last year.
Israel has vowed to use everything in its power to increase the pressure on the embattled Hamas-led government to free 19-year-old corporal Gilad Shalit and to stop rocket attacks.
Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas charged the offensive had unleashed ”new crimes against humanity”, in comments carried by the official Wafa news agency.
Abbas, whose repeated calls for militants to stop launching rockets have gone unheeded, urged the international community and UN Security Council to put pressure Israel into ending ”this destructive policy immediately”.
Inspecting troops based near Gaza, Israel’s Chief of Staff Dan Halutz warned that militants had and would ”pay a heavy price” if they continue their attacks, maintaining that ”40 terrorists” had been killed in the offensive.
The return of troops to Gaza has evoked memories of the army’s disastrous 1982 invasion of Lebanon where soldiers similarly sought to create a security zone but became bogged down in a deadly quagmire before pulling out in 2000.
”Israel is not willing to sink into a swamp in Gaza, and the IDF [Israeli army] is operating in the field in order not to sink into Gaza,” said Defence Minister Amir Peretz, who has been publicly criticised for his handling of the crisis.
But Palestinians have continued their rocket attacks unchecked, firing 17 such crudely manufactured projectiles since the army’s latest offensive began.
Three Israelis were lightly wounded when five projectiles rained down on the southern desert town of Sderot, where Peretz lives with his family, the army said.
The Hamas-led government — whose Gaza offices have been bombed in Israel’s offensive and which is boycotted both financially and politically by Israel and the West — has urged all Palestinians to take up arms against the army.
Aid groups have expressed concern about the difficulties of providing assistance to 1,4-million people living in impoverished Gaza following months of financial crisis and the suspension of direct Western aid to the government.
The UN World Food Programme called for a humanitarian corridor to be set up to enable food deliveries — disrupted since Israel first launched its Gaza offensive last week — to the territory, whatever the military situation.
The European Commission also allocated $43-million in humanitarian aid to people in need in the Palestinian territories as well as in Lebanon.
Hundreds of mourners perspiring in the oppressive heat attended the funerals for those killed on Thursday, the deadliest day in the Palestinian territories since March 8 2002 when 46 people were killed in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.
Ground forces advanced at least 5km into northern Gaza to expand a self-declared buffer zone aimed at preventing rocket attacks, massing around Beit Hanun and moving into two neighbourhoods of Beit Lahiya.
Israeli forces took over the remains of the Dugit, Elei Sinai and Nissanit settlements, razed last year as part of Israel’s historic pullout from Gaza that was meant to draw the curtain on a 38-year occupation.
Nevertheless, an opinion poll found that Israelis want to go further, with an overwhelming 82% seeing the assassination of Hamas leaders as the best means to release Shalit and stop rocket attacks. — AFP
