Hamas Leader Dares Israel to Invade Amid Gaza Airstrikes
The New York Times
Wissam Nasser for The New York Times
GAZA CITY — The top leader of Hamas dared Israel on Monday to launch a ground invasion of Gaza
and dismissed diplomatic efforts to broker a cease-fire in the
six-day-old conflict, as the Israeli military conducted a new wave of
deadly airstrikes on the besieged Palestinian
enclave, including a second hit on a 15-story building that houses
media outlets. A volley of rockets fired from Gaza into southern Israel
included one that hit a vacant school.
Speaking at a news conference in Cairo, where the diplomatic efforts were under way, the Hamas leader, Khaled Meshal,
suggested that the Israeli infantry mobilization on the border with
Gaza was a bluff on the part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of
Israel.
“If you wanted to launch it, you would have done it,” Mr. Meshal told
reporters. He accused Israel of using the invasion threat as an attempt
to “dictate its own terms and force us into silence.”
Rejecting Israel’s contention that Hamas had precipitated the conflict,
Mr. Meshal said the burden was on the Israelis. “The demand of the
people of Gaza is meeting their legimitate demands — for Israel to be
restrained from its aggression, assassinations and invasions, and for
the siege over Gaza to be ended,” he said.
Mr. Netanyahu met with top ministers Monday evening and Israeli media
said they discussed the next steps in the Gaza conflict, including the
possibility of a truce. Israeli officials declined to comment on those
reports.
The Hamas Health Ministry said Monday evening that a total of 107 people
had been killed since Wednesday morning, when Israeli airstrikes began,
following months of Palestinian rocket fire into Israel. A spokeswoman
for the Israeli military said she believed that a majority of these were
militants, though it is difficult to know because Hamas’s own fighting
brigade and the other factional groups are secretive.
The Hamas ministry said that the dead included at least 26 children, 10
women and 12 men over 50, who were presumably not involved in combat. Of
the remainder, at least 36 are known militants. Hamas officials said
more than 860 have been wounded, 260 of them children, 140 of them women
and 55 men over 50.
Three people have been killed so far in Israel, all civilians, in a
rocket strike that hit an apartment house in the southern Israeli town
of Kiryat Malachi on Thursday morning. The Israelis have said that at
least 79 Israelis have been wounded and that Gaza rockets have reached
as far north as Tel Aviv.
The latest Gaza casualties — 22 people reported killed since midnight
local time — included Palestinians killed in strikes by warplanes, a drone attack
on two men on a motorcycle, and a father and two toddler sons in their
bombed northern Gaza home, witnesses and medical sources said.
Another
Israeli drone attack killed the driver of a taxi hired by journalists
and displaying “Press” signs, although it was not clear which
journalists had hired it, Palestinian officials said.
On Sunday, Israeli forces attacked two buildings housing local
broadcasters and production companies used by foreign outlets. Israeli
officials denied targeting journalists, but on Monday Israeli forces
again blasted the Al Sharouk block, a multiuse building where many local
broadcasters, as well as Sky News of Britain and the channel Al
Arabiya, had offices.
That attack, which struck a computer shop on the third floor, sparked a
blaze that sent plumes of dark smoke creeping up the sides of the
building. Video footage showed clouds of smoke billowing.
An Israeli bomb pummeled a home deep into the ground here on Sunday,
killing 11 people, including nine in three generations of a single
family, in the deadliest single strike since the latest conflict began.
Members of the family were buried Monday in a rite that turned into a
gesture of defiance and became a rally supporting Gaza’s militant Hamas
rulers.
A militant leader said Tel Aviv, in the Israeli heartland, would be hit
“over and over” and warned Israelis that their leaders were misleading
them and would “take them to hell.”
Israel says its onslaught is designed to stop Hamas from launching the
rockets, but, after an apparent lull overnight, more missiles hurtled
toward targets in Israel, some of them intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome
defense system. Of five rockets fired on Monday at the southern Israeli
city of Ashkelon, four were intercepted but one smashed through the
concrete roof at the entrance to an empty school. There were no reports
of casualties. Other rockets rained on areas along the border with Gaza.
Later a second salvo struck Ashkelon. Several rockets were intercepted,
but one crashed down onto a house, causing damage but no casualties.
Israeli officials said 135 rockets were fired from Gaza at Israel on
Monday, of which 42 were intercepted by Iron Dome, Most of the others
landed in open areas.
On Sunday, a new volley of Palestinian rockets totaled nearly 100 by
nightfall, including two that soared toward Tel Aviv but were knocked
out of the sky by Israeli defenses.
In a statement on Monday, the Israel Defense Forces said overnight
targets included “underground rocket launchers, terror tunnels, training
bases, Hamas
command posts and weapon storage facilities.” But news reports said the
strikes flattened two houses belonging to a single family, killing two
children and two adults and injuring 42 people, while a shrapnel burst
from another attack killed one child and wounded others living near the
rubble of the former national security compound.
In Gaza City, the body of a young boy was recovered
after a blast on Sunday. The attack further indicated that Israel was
striking a wider range of targets.
The latest exchanges offered a grim backdrop to Egyptian-led cease-fire
efforts that have so far proved inconclusive. The United Nations
secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, was set to join the effort in Cairo.
Brig. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, the spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces,
said there had been a reduction of up to 40 percent in rocket fire from
Gaza, while Israeli forces had launched 40 attacks on tunnels between
Egypt and Gaza, both at the entrances and along the road leading to
them, causing considerable damage.
He said six rocket launching teams and two men on motorcycles were hit,
while the Israeli forces continued to intercept Palestinian radio
signals to urge Gaza residents to steer clear of activists.
In the Israeli strike on Sunday morning, it took emergency workers and a
Caterpillar digger more than an hour to reveal the extent of the
devastation under the two-story home of Jamal Dalu, a shop owner. Mr.
Dalu was at the market when the blast wiped out nearly his entire
family: His sister, wife, two daughters, daughter-in-law and four
grandchildren ages 2 to 6 all perished under the rubble, along with two
neighbors, an 18-year-old and his grandmother.
Ismail Haniya, the prime minister of the militant Hamas faction that
rules Gaza, condemned the attack as a “massacre” that “exceeded all
expectations.”
General Mordechai, the spokesman for the Israeli military, said it was “examining the event.”
“The wanted target in this case was responsible for firing dozens of
rockets into Israel,” he added. “I do not know what happened to him, but
I do know that we are committed to the safety of the citizens of
Israel.”
The Dalu family were buried Monday after an intense, chaotic two-hour
funeral procession that quickly became a Hamas rally clearly aimed at
least in part at sending a strong message of defiance through the scores
of journalists in the crowd. Thousands thronged the streets following
the bodies from the destroyed Dalu home to the Esraa Mosque and then to
the Sheikh Radwan cemetery, shouting slogans of resistance as fighters
fired rifles into the air and waved the green Hamas flags as well as the
white ones of the armed Al Qassam Brigades.
Outside the cemetery, a Qassam leader named Mosheer Al Masri spoke not about the victims but about the enemy.
“Tel Aviv, which we hit, will be hit over and over until you stop your
crimes against our civilians,” Mr. Masri said. “Your threats will not
scare us, they will just make us stronger and more resistant.”
He threatened a repeat of the 2006 kidnapping of Sgt. Gilad Shalit if
Israel proceeded with a ground invasion, and vowed “revenge for the
killing of these children.” He offered a message to Israelis: “Your
leaders are misleading you and will take you to hell.”
“Our message to Netanyahu is that we will defeat you like we defeated
your ancestors,” he added. “We still have so much in our pockets and we
will show you if we have to.”
Labels: Conflict, Culture, Gaza, Hamas, Israel
posted by Pieface @ Monday, November 19, 2012
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