Israeli warplanes and helicopters pounded the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip on Saturday, killing at least 225 people in one of the bloodiest days in the Palestinians’ conflict with Israel.
Militants in the Gaza Strip, who have launched dozens of rocket attacks against Israel since a truce expired just over a week ago, fired more salvoes that killed one Israeli man and wounded several others.
Both sides said they were ready to stage wider assaults.
Black smoke billowed over Gaza City, where the dead and wounded lay scattered on the ground after the Israeli air strikes destroyed more than 30 security compounds, including two where Hamas was hosting graduation ceremonies for new recruits.
At the main police headquarters, some rescue workers beat their heads and shouted ”God is greatest”. One badly wounded man lying nearby quietly recited verses from the Qu’ran. Hamas called the assault a ”massacre”.
Israel said it had targeted ”terrorist infrastructure” following days of rocket attacks from Gaza on southern Israel that caused some damage but few injuries.
”There is a time for calm and a time for fighting, and now the time has come to fight,” Defence Minister Ehud Barak said.
The rocket attacks had increased pressure on Israeli political leaders to strike Hamas ahead of a February 10 election.
Barak said that the military campaign would take time and would be expanded ”as necessary”. Hamas leaders could be targeted, an army spokesperson said. Hamas reported a new Israeli air strike after dark in southern Gaza.
The mayor of Ashkelon, the Mediterranean coastal city in range of Hamas’s Grad rockets, said Israeli military planners had told him the operation would last for ”more than a week”.
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, a leading candidate to become Israel’s next prime minister, called for international support against ”an extremist Islamist organisation … that is being supported by Iran”, Israel’s arch-foe.
”Only last week Israel was attacked from the Gaza Strip and in a day about 80 missiles and mortars were fired against Israeli civilians,” she said. ”Enough is enough.”
United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called for an ”immediate halt to all violence”.
The administration of United States President George Bush, in its final weeks in office, appeared to put the onus on Hamas to prevent a further escalation.
Reaction
”Hamas’ continued rocket attacks into Israel must cease if the violence is to stop,” White House spokesperson Gordon Johndroe said in a statement that urged Israel to avoid civilian casualties but stopped short of calling for an end to the Israeli air strikes.
European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana, in contrast, called for an immediate ceasefire and urged ”everybody to exert maximum restraint”, his spokesperson said.
Hamas threatened to unleash ”hell” to avenge the dead, including possible suicide bombings inside Israel.
Hamas estimated that at least 100 members of its security forces were killed, including police chief Tawfiq Jabber and the head of Hamas’s security and protection unit, along with at least 15 women and some children.
Morgues across the Gaza Strip ran out of space for bodies.
The Islamist group, which won a 2006 parliamentary election but was shunned by Western powers over its refusal to renounce violence and recognise Israel, said all of its security compounds in the Gaza Strip were destroyed.
Aid groups said they feared the Israeli operation could fuel a humanitarian crisis in the impoverished coastal enclave, home to 1,5-million Palestinians, half of them dependent on food aid.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said the Israeli air campaign was ”criminal” and urged the international community to intervene.
Palestinians staged protest rallies in Arab East Jerusalem, and in the West Bank cities of Ramallah and Hebron, leading to scuffles with the Israeli army.
Egypt said it would keep trying to restore the truce between Israel and Gaza. Arab foreign ministers were set to hold an emergency meeting in Cairo on Sunday or Monday to take a common position on the raids.
Israeli military analyst Ron Ben-Yishai said the strike was ”shock treatment … aimed at securing a long-term ceasefire between Hamas and Israel on terms that are favourable to Israel”.
Israeli warplanes also destroyed Gaza’s presidential compound, which Hamas seized in June 2007 from Abbas’s secular Fatah forces after a brief civil war.
At the main Gaza City graduation ceremony, uniformed bodies lay in a pile and the wounded writhed in pain. Rescuers carried those showing signs of life to cars and ambulances, while others tried to revive the unconscious.
Witnesses also reported heavy Israeli bombing along Gaza’s border with Egypt. Palestinians use hundreds of tunnels under the border to bring in everything from goods to weapons.
The campaign followed a decision by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s security cabinet to widen reprisals for cross-border Palestinian rocket attacks following the collapse of a six-month-old, Egyptian-brokered ceasefire a week ago.
A five-day Israeli offensive in March killed more than 120 people, but Saturday’s death toll would be the highest for Palestinians since their 1980s uprising.
Olmert, who will leave office after the February election, has repeatedly said Israel does not want to retake control of the Gaza Strip. Israel pulled its ground forces and settlers out of the coastal territory in 2005.
After a 2006 war in Lebanon that many Israelis viewed as a failure, military action in Gaza has become a political hot potato that could affect the outcome of the election. – Reuters