Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip fired three homemade rockets into Israel yesterday, hours after Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert pledged to push forward with airstrikes against the militants despite a recent string of civilian casualties.
The army said there were no injuries or damage from the rocket fire. But the attack drew a call from a prominent legislator for Israel to launch a military offensive into the densely populated Gaza Strip.
Speaking on Thursday evening at an economic conference in Jerusalem, Olmert apologized "from the depths of my being" for civilian deaths in recent airstrikes in Gaza.
But he added, "Israel will continue to carry out targeted attacks against terrorists and those who try to harm Israeli citizens."
He said, "I am deeply sorry for the residents of Gaza but the lives, security and well-being of the residents of Sderot is no less important," naming the southern Israeli town that has been pelted by rockets fired from Gaza.
Olmert issued a similar apology earlier on Thursday after an informal meeting in Jordan with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. It was the first meeting between Israeli and Palestinian leaders in more than a year.
Yuval Steinitz, former chairman of the Israeli parliament's foreign affairs and defense committee, accused Palestinian authorities of failing to prevent rocket fire. He said Israel must now take further steps to protect itself.
"I call on the government of Israel to wait no further, but to launch a comprehensive ground operation in Gaza for several weeks, to strike at the very foundations of the terrorist infrastructure," the lawmaker from the hard-line Likud Party told Israel Radio.
Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip last summer, pulling out its troops and closing all Jewish settlements there.
Steinitz said a Gaza offensive should be along the lines of the army's "Operation Defensive Shield" launched into the West Bank after 29 Israelis were killed in a suicide bombing during Passover celebrations in spring 2002.
Haim Ramon, a Cabinet minister in the ruling Kadima Party, warned against sending troops into the hostile and heavily armed coastal strip. He said the mission could cost many lives on both sides and leave Israeli forces bogged down in a reoccupation of the territory, first captured in the 1967 Mideast War.
"Those `few weeks' will turn into 40 years," he told the radio in responses to Steinitz's call.
Palestinian militants have fired rockets toward Israel almost daily since Israel completed the Gaza withdrawal last September. The crude weapons have baffled the Israeli army, whose repeated airstrikes and artillery fire have failed to halt the rocket fire.
The Israeli air strikes have killed dozens of militants. But three recent air force raids killed a total of 13 Palestinian civilians.
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