Starting the fifth day of Israel's largest offensive in Gaza in four years of conflict, army commanders were talking of a weeks-long operation, while officials looked even further ahead -- to Israel's planned evacuation of settlements from Gaza next year.
Early yesterday, despite the massive operation meant to prevent rocket attacks on Israeli towns, militants in Gaza fired off two rockets at the Israeli town of Sderot. One person was lightly wounded in the attack, Israeli rescue workers said.
PHOTO: AP
The Hamas militant group claimed responsibility for the rocket attack.
In the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahiya, Israeli troops killed four Palestinian militants as they tried to set off a bomb, the army said. The four were killed in a helicopter missile strike, the army said.
Palestinians identified the four as Hamas militants, one of them a field commander in northern Gaza, Fares Masri, 29, the brother of Hamas spokesman Musher Masri, who came to the hospital to identify the body.
A few hours earlier, Israeli forces targeted a local Hamas commander and another militant in a Gaza City air strike, the army said. The commander was seriously wounded in the attack. A second militant and a bystander were also wounded, hospital officials said.
The large-scale operation in northern Gaza gathered momentum again late Sunday when about 25 tanks moved into Beit Hanoun, the town closest to the Israeli border and the town of Sderot across the fence.
About 15,000 people living in the area of the raid have been without water and electricity for days.
A rocket attack on the town Wednesday killed two tots and set off the operation. Since Thursday, at least 62 Palestinians and three Israelis have been killed. Eight Palestinians, including a 13-year-old boy, were killed Sunday.
Israeli forces have cleared a 9km buffer zone in Gaza to move its towns out of range of the rockets, but militants keep trying. An Israeli helicopter fired a missile at militants, killing two, just after they shot off a rocket.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon pledged to expand the area under Israeli control to stop the rocket fire.
"The forces will have to remain there as long as this danger exists," Sharon told Army Radio, and Lieutenant General Moshe Yaalon, the army commander, said, "The troops are ready to continue, not in terms of days, but weeks."
Israeli officials fear that the continuing rocket fire might undermine the already shaky support for Sharon's Gaza pullout plan. Critics warn that after an Israeli exit, the rocket attacks would only escalate.
Many of the critics are from Sharon's own Likud Party, which has voted against the plan twice in different frameworks. Sharon and Likud have for decades been the main forces behind settlement construction and expansion, and Sharon's party members have not taken kindly to his change of heart.
Presenting his plan to evacuate all 21 Gaza settlements and four small ones from the West Bank, Sharon said the presence of 8,000 Jewish settlers among 1.3 million Palestinians had become untenable.
Tens of thousands of Filipino Catholics yesterday twirled white cloths and chanted “Viva, viva,” as a centuries-old statue of Jesus Christ was paraded through the streets of Manila in the nation’s biggest annual religious event. The day-long procession began before dawn, with barefoot volunteers pulling the heavy carriage through narrow streets where the devout waited in hopes of touching the icon, believed to hold miraculous powers. Thousands of police were deployed to manage crowds that officials believe could number in the millions by the time the statue reaches its home in central Manila’s Quiapo church around midnight. More than 800 people had sought
DENIAL: Pyongyang said a South Korean drone filmed unspecified areas in a North Korean border town, but Seoul said it did not operate drones on the dates it cited North Korea’s military accused South Korea of flying drones across the border between the nations this week, yesterday warning that the South would face consequences for its “unpardonable hysteria.” Seoul quickly denied the accusation, but the development is likely to further dim prospects for its efforts to restore ties with Pyongyang. North Korean forces used special electronic warfare assets on Sunday to bring down a South Korean drone flying over North Korea’s border town. The drone was equipped with two cameras that filmed unspecified areas, the General Staff of the North Korean People’s Army said in a statement. South Korea infiltrated another drone
COMMUNIST ALIGNMENT: To Lam wants to combine party chief and state presidency roles, with the decision resting on the election of 200 new party delegates next week Communist Party of Vietnam General Secretary To Lam is seeking to combine his party role with the state presidency, officials said, in a move that would align Vietnam’s political structure more closely to China’s, where President Xi Jinping (習近平) heads the party and state. Next week about 1,600 delegates are to gather in Hanoi to commence a week-long communist party congress, held every five years to select new leaders and set policy goals for the single-party state. Lam, 68, bade for both top positions at a party meeting last month, seeking initial party approval ahead of the congress, three people briefed by
Cambodia’s government on Wednesday said that it had arrested and extradited to China a tycoon who has been accused of running a huge online scam operation. The Cambodian Ministry of the Interior said that Prince Holding Group chairman Chen Zhi (陳志) and two other Chinese citizens were arrested and extradited on Tuesday at the request of Chinese authorities. Chen formerly had dual nationality, but his Cambodian citizenship was revoked last month, the ministry said. US prosecutors in October last year brought conspiracy charges against Chen, alleging that he had been the mastermind behind a multinational cyberfraud network, used his other businesses to launder
RSS