No early end seen to 'war' on Hamas in Gaza
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JERUSALEM: Israel is engaged in an "all-out war with Hamas," Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Parliament on Monday as his air force struck at the organization's civic institutions — the Islamic University, Interior Ministry and presidential guesthouse. The death toll surpassed 350, some 60 of them civilians, according to United Nations officials.
As the conflict passed its third day, with no active diplomacy and anti-Israel protesters taking to the streets around the Arab world, there appeared to be no quick end to the largest assault on Gaza in decades.
Israel has defined its aims relatively narrowly, saying it seeks to cripple Hamas's ability to fire rockets into Israel. It has not made clear if it means to topple the leadership of Hamas, which Israel and the United States brand as a terrorist organization.
Hamas sought to cast its fighters as martyrs in a continuing battle against Israel, the lone resisters in a Palestinian community divided between Gaza, where Hamas rules, and the West Bank, which is governed by the rival Fatah organization.
Hamas killed three Israelis on Monday after firing more than 70 rockets, including a long-range one into the booming city of Ashdod some 18 miles from Gaza, where it hit a bus stop, killing a woman and injuring two other people. Earlier, a rocket hit nearby Ashkelon, killing an Israeli-Arab construction worker and wounding three of his colleagues.
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Thousands of Israelis huddled in shelters as the long-range rockets hit streets or open areas late in the night, the most serious display of Hamas's arsenal since the Israeli assault began.
In Gaza, residents pulled relatives from the rubble of prominent institutions leveled by waves of Israeli F-16 attacks, as hospitals struggled to keep up with the wounded and the dead and doctors scrambled for scarce medical supplies. Hamas gunmen shot accused collaborators with Israel in public; families huddled around battery-powered radios, desperate for news.
Barak said Israel would widen and deepen the attack if necessary and told Israeli lawmakers the military would continue the assault until Hamas no longer had the ability to fire rockets into Israel. Politicians on the left who supported the initial attack urged the government to seek a new cease-fire rather than continue the bombardment.
But the military created a two-mile war cordon along the Gaza border and amassed tanks and troops there, with commanders saying that a ground force invasion was a distinct possibility but had not yet been decided upon.
In Crawford, Texas, a spokesman for President George W. Bush renewed calls for the parties to reach a cease-fire, but said Israel was justified in retaliating against Hamas rocket attacks. "Let's just take this one day at a time," said the spokesman, Gordon Johndroe.
Allies of Hamas in parts of the Muslim world raised their voices. In Beirut, tens of thousands of Hezbollah supporters stood in pouring rain in protest, and in Tehran a group of influential conservative Iranian clerics began an online registration drive seeking volunteers to fight Israel.
Barak had told lawmakers that Israel had nothing against the citizens of Gaza and that it had more than once offered its hand in peace to the Palestinian nation. "But we have an all-out war with Hamas and its offshoots," he said.
Israel sent in some 40 trucks of humanitarian relief, including blood from Jordan and medicine. Egypt opened its border with Gaza to some similar aid and to allow some of the wounded through.
At Shifa Hospital in Gaza, the director, Dr. Hussein Ashour, said that keeping his patients alive from their wounds was an enormous challenge. He said there were some 1,500 wounded people distributed among Gaza's nine hospitals with far too few intensive care units, equipped ambulances or other vital equipment.
On Monday, Ashour was not the only official in charge. Armed Hamas militants in civilian clothes roamed the halls. Asked their function, they said it was to provide security. But there was internal bloodletting under way.
In the fourth-floor orthopedic section, a woman in her late 20s asked a militant to let her see Saleh Hajoj, her 32-year-old husband. She was turned away and left the hospital. Fifteen minutes later, Hajoj was carried out by young men pretending to transfer him to another ward. As he lay on the stretcher, he was shot in the left side of the head.
Hajoj, like five others who have been killed at the hospital this way in the past 24 hours, was accused of collaboration with Israel. He had been in the central prison awaiting trial by Hamas judges; when Israel destroyed the prison on Sunday he and the others were transferred to the hospital. But their trials were short-circuited.
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