Israel struck at the heart of the Palestinian government yesterday, hitting the Gaza office of the Hamas prime minister in a new wave of air raids and warning it would do everything in its power to free a soldier captured by militants a week ago.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said his government would not bow to "blackmail" as Palestinian officials cautioned that Egyptian-led mediation efforts under way to free 19-year-old Gilad Shalit were faltering.
"Efforts continue but so far in vain. We are near an impasse," Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas's spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina told reporters.
"The coming hours will be crucial," he said. "We do not want to throw Gaza into a never-ending war."
Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz told a Cabinet meeting that Israel would go after "higher-caliber targets" in the future -- a reference to senior Hamas officials both inside and outside of the Palestinian territories, a high-ranking political official said.
Israel has launched its biggest military operation in a year over the captured soldier, sending troops back into the Gaza Strip last week and launching wave after wave of air raids after nightfall.
And in a dramatic new warning to the embattled Palestinian administration, helicopter gunships fired on Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniya's office in Gaza overnight, setting the building ablaze.
"It's an attack against a Palestinian symbol," said Haniya, who was not in the office at the time.
"We ask the international community and the Arab League to take its responsibilities towards our people and intervene" to end Israel's "insane policy," he said.
Israel made clear it was deliberately targeting the government of Hamas, which took office in March but is blacklisted as a terror group by Israel and the West.
Roni Bar-On, an Israeli Cabinet minister, said the objective of the attack on Haniyeh's office was to "compromise the Hamas government's ability to rule."
"We will strike and will continue to strike at [Hamas'] institutions," said Bar-On, an Olmert ally. "They have to understand that we will not continue to let them run amok."
Israel has rejected outright the demands of militant groups which seized Shalit in a deadly attack on an army post on the Gaza border on June 25 and are now seeking the release of Palestinian prisoners.
It has also threatened to strike at Hamas leaders, including those based in Damascus, raising fears of a regional escalation of the worst crisis in the Middle East since Hamas came to power and Olmert took the helm in Israel.
"My government has instructed the IDF [army] and the security establishment to do everything in order to bring Gilad back home ... and when I say everything, I mean everything," Olmert told the weekly Cabinet meeting.
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