Smoke rises after an Israeli air strike on an alleged Hamas site in the south east of Gaza City yesterday.
GAZA CITY: Israeli strikes on Gaza killed 14 Palestinians and destroyed the Hamas government headquarters yesterday as Israel called up thousands more reservists for a possible ground war.
After Palestinian militants fired rockets at the heart of Israel on Friday, Israeli warplanes carried out 180 air strikes overnight, Israel television reported, with attacks levelling the headquarters of the Hamas government.
“It’s like a real-life horror movie, what I saw today... It’s a miracle we’re still alive,” said 18-year-old Suha, standing outside her house.
Medics said 44 Gazans have been killed and more than 390 wounded since Israel launched its aerial campaign on Wednesday afternoon, with at least eight militants among the 14 people killed yesterday.
As the toll rose, sirens sounds in Tel Aviv for a third day, sending people scuttling for cover a day after a rocket hit the sea near the city centre, witnesses said. Officials said one rocket was intercepted by the Iron Dome anti-missile system while a second hit somewhere in the Tel Aviv metropolitan area.
Israel’s Channel 10 television showed live footage of an Iron Dome battery near Tel Aviv firing twice at a Fajr 5 rocket and successfully intercepting it. The attack was claimed by Hamas’s armed wing. Four Israeli soldiers and five civilians were hurt in separate rocket attacks on the south, police and the army said. Hamas claimed the attack on the soldiers, while Islamic Jihad said it was behind rockets which injured civilians in Ashdod.
Warplanes carried out 180 air strikes on Gaza overnight, Israeli television reported, with attacks levelling the headquarters of the Hamas government.
After a night of strikes on targets including the headquarters of Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniya and other government buildings, the Israeli military turned its attention to senior Hamas officials. In a statement, it said the air force had targeted “a senior Hamas operative in charge of the terror organisation’s smuggling operations.. and the senior member of Hamas’s air defence unit, Mohammed Kaleb.”
The violence came as Tunisian Foreign Minister Rafik Abdessalem paid a brief solidarity visit to Gaza, urging the world to stop Israel’s “blatant aggression,” as he toured Haniyah’s ruined headquarters.
In Egypt, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Israel would be held to account for the children killed. “Everyone must know that sooner or later there will be a holding to account for the massacre of these innocent children killed inhumanely in Gaza,” he said in a speech in Cairo. So far, six children have been killed, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights said.
Both Turkey and Egypt have publicly shrugged off US bids to get them to exert pressure on the Islamist Hamas into ending rocket fire, instead blaming the Jewish state for the violence.
US Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes said both President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agree that de-escalation is preferable, provided that Hamas ceases firing on Israel. “We believe that the precipitating factor for the conflict was the rocket fire coming out of Gaza,” Rhodes told reporters.
“We believe that Israel has a right to defend itself, and they’ll make their own decisions about the tactics that they use in that regard.”
Since the start of Operation Pillar of Defence, the Israeli army says militants have fired more than 600 rockets over the border, of which 430 hit and 245 were intercepted by Iron Dome missiles. Over the same period, three Israelis have been killed and 18 injured, including 10 soldiers, with the army saying the air force had hit more than 950 targets in Gaza.
Late on Friday, the military sealed off all main roads around Gaza in the latest sign it was poised to launch its first ground offensive on the territory since its 22-day campaign over New Year 2009.
Israeli ministers approved the call-up of as many as 75,000 reservists on Friday after Hamas militants said they fired a rocket at Jerusalem, and another hit the sea off Tel Aviv, causing panic but no casualties. Meanwhile, online activist group Anonymous said it had downed the websites of dozens of Israeli state agencies and the Bank of Jerusalem in protest over the deadly air assault on Gaza.
Agencies
