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Palestinians fled their homes Sunday to seek shelter at a United Nations school in Gaza City. Credit Mohammed Saber/European Pressphoto Agency
JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, facing growing international support for a cease-fire in the latest conflict with Palestinian militants in Gaza, said once again on Sunday that the Israeli army was “prepared for any possibility.â€
“I don’t know when the operation will end, it might take much more time,†Mr. Netanyahu said in broadcast remarks before his weekly cabinet meeting.
On the sixth day of Israel’s aerial bombardment of Gaza aimed at quelling Palestinian rocket fire, militant groups in that coastal enclave continued to launch rockets into Israel. Both sides appeared ready to continue and to escalate the conflict.
Israeli troops are massed on the Gaza border and more than 30,000 reservists have been called up, ready for a possible ground invasion.
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An Israeli strike overnight aimed at Gen. Tayseer al-Batsh, commander of the Hamas police in Gaza, killed an estimated 21 Palestinians leaving a mosque. The general was wounded. An Israeli teenager was wounded by shrapnel from a rocket fired at the coastal city of Ashkelon, according to the Israeli ambulance service.
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Israeli soldiers sleeping in an army deployment area near Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip. Credit Jack Guez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Also overnight, Israeli naval commandos raided a Gaza beach that the Israeli military said was a launching site for long-range rockets. Four soldiers were slightly wounded in an engagement with local gunmen.
Thousands of residents of the northern Gaza Strip headed south, heeding warnings from the Israeli military to flee for their safety.
The military said in a statement that it was distributing leaflets telling Palestinian residents of Beit Lahiya to leave by noon because the military “intends to attack terrorists and terror infrastructures†in several specific locations including east of Al-Atatra. The statement said that rockets were being launched from those areas and that the military campaign there was to be “short and temporary.â€
A spokesman for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which assists the Palestinian refugees, said the organization had opened eight of its schools and that more than 4,000 people had taken refuge in its facilities.
The Interior Ministry in Gaza, which is dominated by Hamas, told people to return home, saying those who fled were helping the enemy, according to Israel Radio.
International players appear increasingly alarmed by the rising death toll from the Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, which has reached at least 140, and the prospect of a ground invasion, as well as the persistent Palestinian rocket fire aimed at civilian population centers across a huge swathe of Israel, which is keeping millions of Israelis on alert for sirens and running for shelter.
Hamas has a number of conditions for a cease-fire, experts said, including the release once again by Israel of dozens of Hamas prisoners who were first released in 2011 as part of an exchange for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier who was held captive by Hamas in Gaza for five years. However, the former prisoners were rearrested last month during Israel’s clampdown in the West Bank following the kidnap and killing of three Israeli teenagers there. Israel blames Hamas for the episode, and Israel’s internal security agency said Hamas prisoners had returned to terrorist activity.
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Major Strikes So Far
Here are approximate locations of 19 major airstrikes that resulted in deaths since Israel began its air campaign on Tuesday. The Israeli military says it has struck more than 1,100 targets since it started the operation in response to waves of rockets being fired from Gaza.
6 people killed on Tuesday when two missiles struck the house of a man said to be an Islamic Jihad commander.
3 killed when war- planes targeted a car on Thursday. The three were said to be members of Al-Quds Brigades.
GAZA IS
ABOUT 25
MILES LONG
9 killed when a missile struck a cafe Wednesday night where about a dozen locals had gathered to watch the World Cup. Israeli military said the target was a single terrorist.
8 killed, including six children, when war-planes targeted their house on Thursday in Khan Younis refugee camp.
Hamas also needs money to pay its 40,000 employees in Gaza and is seeking the reopening of the Rafah crossing on Gaza’s border with Egypt.
Israel, according to experts, wants the Palestinians to quell the rocket fire and to ensure that any renewed cease-fire deal will last much longer than the last one, which was reached after fighting in late 2012.
Israeli ministers are calling for Hamas and the other militant groups in Gaza to be stripped of their weapons.
Yuval Steinitz, the country’s minister for strategic affairs, told Israel Radio that the immediate goal of the offensive, known as Operation Protective Edge “is quiet.â€
“ The strategic goal,†Mr. Steinitz said, “is demilitarization. We have to finally not be satisfied with a temporary filling but do a root canal.â€
“With all the difficulty entailed,†he said, “I think we have no way out other than a ground operation to take over Gaza in order to dismantle with our own hands the terror army, the missiles, the weapons industry in the Gaza Strip. It is complicated but maybe there is no alternative.â€
In an official statement on Saturday, Israel suggested that no firm cease-fire deal was on the table, but it left the door open for a ground operation or for diplomacy.
“We are not relating to this or that proposal,†the statement said. “The goal of Operation Protective Edge was, and remains, to restore quiet to Israel for an extended period while dealing a significant blow to Hamas and the other terrorist organizations in the Gaza Strip. This goal will be achieved, whether militarily or diplomatically, and the IDF is prepared to broaden its activities as necessary.â€
Tony Blair, the special envoy of the so-called Quartet of Middle East peacemakers, consisting of the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia, met with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt in Cairo over the weekend.
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An explosion in the northern Gaza Strip on Sunday after an Israeli airstrike. Credit Ammar Awad/Reuters
A spokesman for Mr. Sisi said in a statement Saturday that the Egyptian leader was “in close contact with both the Israelis and the Palestinians to halt the violence and military operations that stem from stubbornness and intransigence and that result in the loss of innocent civilian life.â€
By Sunday, though, a senior Hamas official said he had seen no “serious moves†from Egypt to push for a cease-fire. “So far there have been some unofficial calls, and some solutions suggested, but an official contact has not been made,†he said. “Egypt needs to officially adopt the Palestinian demands and push Israel to a cease-fire. The Israeli side feels no pressure.â€
Egypt’s relations with Hamas have turned bitter since Mr. Sisi took over last year. For one thing, Egypt has closed most of the tunnels running beneath its border with Gaza that were both an economic lifeline for the coastal enclave and a major channel for weapons smuggling.
In the end, Israeli officials and analysts say that Egypt, despite some reluctance, is likely to play a role in brokering any cease-fire. There is also talk of involvement by Qatar, and the Obama administration has offered to help facilitate cease-fire efforts.
Michael Herzog, a retired Israeli general and a former negotiator for the government, said for now there was a lack of a credible mechanism leading the effort for a cease-fire.
“As long as we don’t have that, we unfortunately might see ongoing confrontation between the parties,†he said.
Mr. Herzog, an Israel-based fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said he did not think Israel would, or should free Hamas prisoners, saying that to do so “would be a reward for violence.â€
Referring to a largely symbolic statement issued on Saturday by the United Nations Security Council calling on both sides to return to a 2012 cease-fire, Hanna Amira, a West Bank-based Palestine Liberation Organization executive committee member, told Palestinian Radio on Sunday: “This announcement deals with the oppressor and the victim in the same way, it is a general call to end the fighting, without setting any mechanism to end the fighting. What is needed is an end to the aggression against the Palestinian people in Gaza.â€
The P.L.O. recently signed a reconciliation pact with Hamas intended to end a seven-year schism between the West Bank and Gaza, but it has been strained from the start, with the P.L.O.-dominated Palestinian Authority refusing, among other things, to pay Hamas’s 40,000 employees.
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