GAZA CITY - Israeli warplanes pounded Gaza Wednesday, killing 24 people in a major new confrontation with Palestinian fighters, as Hamas flexed its firepower and sent thousands running for shelters across the country.
As the death toll from Israel’s two-day Operation Protective Edge reached 45, Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas accused Israel of committing “genocide” in Gaza. But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared bent on ploughing ahead, warning of even tougher action against Hamas.
There have been no Israeli deaths so far. But Hamas began flaunting its firepower overnight, launching waves of long-range rockets across central Israel that triggered sirens in cities as far away as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Sirens even sounded in the northern port city of Haifa, witnesses said, as unconfirmed reports spoke of a rocket hitting near Caesarea and another even further north.
Tanks massed on the Gaza border, AFP correspondents reported, as Netanyahu came under mounting pressure from hardliners within his governing coalition to send ground forces into the territory from which it pulled all troops and settlers in 2005. Bellicose rhetoric followed from the premier.
“We have decided to further intensify the attacks on Hamas and the terror organisations in Gaza,” his office quoted him as saying.
Outgoing Israeli president Shimon Peres warned a ground incursion into the coastal territory was a looming possibility. “If the fire continues we do not rule out a ground incursion,” his office quoted hims as saying in an interview with CNN.
This “may happen quite soon,” CNN quoted him as saying. The 90-year-old ends his term later this month. The escalation comes with Arab riots inside Israel over the burning to death of a Palestinian teenager by Jewish extremists and the region in flames, with civil war raging in neighbouring Syria and conflict intensifying in Iraq.
The European Union and the United States both called for restraint in the confrontation. It came as the Palestinians moved towards greater unity following a reconciliation agreement between Hamas and Abbas that ended seven years of rival administrations.
That deal came after nearly a year of US-brokered peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians collapsed, to the satisfaction of Netanyahu’s hardline coalition partners.
The Palestinian teenager was murdered in apparent revenge for the kidnap on June 12 of three Israeli youths in the occupied West Bank, who were subsequently killed.
Their abductions sparked a huge Israeli assault on Hamas’s infrastructure in the territory and retaliatory rocket fire from the Islamists’ Gaza power base. Six women and nine children were among 24 Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes on Gaza on Wednesday, medics said.
The deadliest single strike took place shortly after midnight when a missile slammed into a house in northern Gaza, killing an Islamic Jihad fighter and five of his family members.
Raids to the north and east of Gaza City killed two women and four children, while a strike on Maghazi refugee camp in central Gaza killed a woman and four of her children, emergency services said.
Another seven Palestinians died in other raids across Gaza throughout the day. But the strikes failed to staunch the rocket fire by Gaza fighters, which sent Israelis scurrying into shelters across an ever broadening swathe of the country.
Two long-range rockets crashed into the sea off the northern port city of Haifa Wednesday, Israeli media reported, in an attack Hamas fighters claimed.
Haifa lies 165 kilometres (100 miles) north of Gaza and, if confirmed, it would be the furthest a rocket fired from there has ever travelled.
Public radio said one struck near the seaside resort of Caesarea and another in the Carmel Beach region, both south of Haifa. Army radio quoted a military source as saying that Hamas had “dozens” of such long-range rockets in its arsenal.
As dawn broke, residents of Beit Hanun in northern Gaza picked through the bloodstained rubble of the home of the slain Islamic Jihad commander and his family. “We didn’t see the rocket that came down on us,” said Yunis Hammad who lost six relatives in the strike, which left a vast crater. “It killed all of them,” he told AFP. So far, neither side has shown any sign of backing down, as Israel stepped up its preparations for a possible ground assault, approving the call up of 40,000 reservists.
Two rockets fired by Gaza fighters Wednesday hit near the southern town of Dimona where Israel has a nuclear reactor, the military said on Twitter.
“A few minutes ago, Palestinian terrorists in Gaza fired three rockets at Dimona. Two fell in open areas; Iron Dome intercepted the other,” it said referring to the Israeli missile defence system. The Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the Gaza-based Hamas, said in a statement it “launched three M75 rockets at Dimona,” referring to the Gaza-produced rockets with a range of about 80 kilometres (50 miles).
Israel has two nuclear reactors, one at Dimona in the Negev desert, and the other at its nuclear research facility at Nahal Sorek, west of Jerusalem.
The Jewish state is widely believed to have around 200 nuclear warheads, but has a policy of neither confirming nor denying that, a stance which it calls “nuclear ambiguity”.
Israeli scientists and politicians have called for the closure of the 50-year-old Dimona plant, saying its age had increased the risk of accidents.
Meanwhile, Egypt on Wednesday urged Israel and the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas in Gaza to halt their escalating conflict but played down hopes of a Cairo-mediated truce.
“There is no mediation, in the common sense of the word,” said Egyptian foreign ministry spokesman Badr Abdelatty. “Egyptian diplomatic efforts are aimed at immediately stopping Israeli aggression and ending all mutual violence. (Egyptian) contacts have not yet achieved a result.”
Iran’s foreign ministry on Wednesday condemned Israeli air raids in the Gaza Strip, calling on the West to urge the Jewish state to prevent a “human catastrophe”.
The remarks by Iran, traditional ally of Palestinian militant group Hamas, came after Israeli warplanes pounded targets in Gaza as part of a major campaign to halt rocket fire from the enclave.
“We are, unfortunately, witnessing the escalation of savage aggression by the Zionists in recent days against the innocent and defenceless people of Palestine,” ministry spokeswoman Marzieh Afkham said in her weekly briefing with reporters.
A senior Hamas official pledged that militants would not “surrender” in the face of the latest air strikes on Wednesday. “There are no ceasefire talks, in the conventional sense. There are ongoing contacts. The Israelis are not interested in mediation, they are looking for surrender,” said Osama Hamdan, who is based in Beirut.
“The situation will clear up in the coming hours. We will respond to this escalation, and Israel might be convinced that the escalation does not help them.”
The death toll in Gaza after two days of Israeli air strikes climbed to more than 40 on Wednesday, emergency services said.
Israel says its air strikes are in retaliation for more than 100 rockets fired into the country by Hamas and other Islamist militants based in the coastal enclave.
The fighting is the deadliest between the two sworn enemies since an eight-day war in November 2012.
During that conflict, now deposed Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi condemned “Israeli aggression” and sent his prime minister to Gaza in a show of support for the Palestinians. Morsi brokered a truce seen as favourable to Hamas, which is linked to his Muslim Brotherhood movement. Since the military overthrew him in July 2013, Cairo has cracked down on smuggling tunnels to the Gaza Strip and accused Hamas of aiding the Brotherhood in militant attacks inside Egypt.
Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the former army chief who ousted Morsi and has been elected president in his place, has said Hamas alienated Egyptians by backing the Brotherhood.
The Egyptian presidency said late Tuesday that Sisi spoke by telephone with West Bank-based Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, his ally, to discuss the Gaza conflict but without elaborating.