Israel targeted Hamas’s top commanders in a Gaza air strike on Wednesday that killed six Palestinians and reduced to rubble a three-storey building where the militants were believed to be meeting.
The Israeli military said the attack wounded Mohammad Deif, leader of the governing Hamas movement’s armed wing and Israel’s most wanted man. It coincided with an armoured sweep into the central Gaza Strip that broadened an offensive in the territory.
A spokesperson for Hamas’s Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, one of three groups whose kidnapping of an Israeli soldier on June 25 led Israel to launch its first ground operations in Gaza since quitting the territory last year, denied Deif was hurt.
Deif has escaped several Israeli assassination attempts, close calls that have turned him into a folk hero to many Palestinians.
Two women and two children were among the six people killed in the air attack on the building, which turned it into a tangle of twisted metal, broken concrete, blood and dust.
”Allahu Akbar [God is Greatest],” one man screamed from under the debris as hundreds of onlookers echoed the call. Rescuers later pulled him out and an ambulance rushed him to hospital.
Israel’s army said Deif had been in the building and that he was targeted because intelligence information showed he and other senior Hamas commanders were planning attacks against Israel.
”We know he was injured, but not to what degree,” said an army spokesperson.
Abu Ubaida, a spokesperson for the Qassam brigades, said: ”We deny it … This is only a cover-up for the massacre of Palestinian civilians committed by the Zionist enemy.”
He declined to say whether Deif was there at the time.
Change in rules of battle
”Our reaction to this massacre will be painful and strong for the Zionists and we will make the enemy leadership sorry for their crime,” said a Qassam statement.
”This new crime is a changing point in the rules of the battle. We will choose the rules of the game in the coming period.
”Our message to the Zionists is that your leaders are leading you to violence from which no one will be safe and when they target civilians they decided for you to be the target of our resistance,” said the statement.
The attack hurt only one Hamas leader, who was not in a life-threatening condition, militants said.
In its new incursion, the army sent dozens of armoured vehicles into central Gaza before dawn, effectively cutting the territory in two.
Israel has vowed to continue the operation, which has already killed more than 65 Palestinians, until militants free captured Corporal Gilad Shalit and stop launching makeshift rockets over the border.
Israel has come under pressure from the European Union and United Nations over its air and ground assaults in Gaza. They say the campaign will cause a humanitarian catastrophe in the densely populated territory of 1,4-million.
Using their bare hands, rescuers dug through the rubble of the building destroyed in the air raid on the edge of Gaza City.
The scene recalled Israel’s assassination of Hamas military commander Salah Shehada in 2002 by dropping a one-tonne bomb on his home.
The death of 14 other people in that attack drew a wave of international criticism.
Israeli Cabinet minister Haim Ramon, speaking after the latest air strike, said that while Israel regretted any civilian casualties, Palestinian militants ”were using innocent people as human shields”.
Israel has rejected calls from Hamas for negotiations on a prisoner swap for the 19-year-old tank gunner, whose abduction has triggered the worst fighting between Israelis and Palestinians since 2004.
The offensive has piled pressure on the Hamas government, already reeling from a Western aid embargo, and dashed any hope of renewing long-frozen peace talks.
The Israeli thrust into central Gaza took troops up to the main road linking the north and south of the territory, a route that was often cut during the years of Israeli rule. Police told travellers to seek an alternative route along the coast.
One policeman was killed in clashes as the Israeli troops entered central Gaza. A commander of the Popular Resistance Committees militant group also died in an air strike close to the Kissufim crossing point from Israel. – Reuters, AFP