Israel killed the commander of the military wing of Hamas and 14 other Palestinians including eight children in an air raid on his home that also wiped out a crowded city block yesterday, hospital officials said.
At least 145 other Palestinians were wounded in the overnight missile strike, defended by Israel as self-defense against suicide bombers but condemned by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan for exacting high casualties among civilians.
PHOTO: AP
Salah Shehada, head of the Izz el-Deen al-Qassam brigades, was killed a day after Hamas's spiritual leader, blind Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, said it would consider halting suicide attacks if Israel withdrew from occupied West Bank cities.
Israel described the missile strike as one of its most significant blows against Palestinian militants. But Hamas vowed revenge, raising the possibility of another welter of violence -- after a month of relative calm -- endangering a fragile new dialogue between Israel and Palestinian moderates.
The Izz el-Deen al-Qassam brigades have killed dozens of Israelis in suicide attacks since the start 22 months ago of a Palestinian uprising for independence in Gaza and the West Bank.
Officials at Gaza City's Shifa Hospital said 15 people were killed -- Shehada, his wife, a daughter and his deputy commander as well as nine children apparently from neighboring homes demolished by the missile launched by an F-16 warplane.
The youngest dead was aged two months and 15 of the wounded were in serious condition, Shifa doctors said.
A reporter saw lumps of flesh piled in a local morgue that medical workers said were retrieved from the wreckage of Shehada's home.
The residential block in the teeming Daraj district was a spectacle of devastation. Locals said there was no forewarning of the missile attack, not even the sound of a plane.
Dazed residents stumbled through debris, looking for loved ones as ambulance sirens wailed.
Several children were rushed away on stretchers in the immediate aftermath of the attack.
Residents and rescue teams continued to comb the wreckage yesterday morning for people who might still be trapped.
Palestinian Cabinet minister Saeb Erekat told the BBC the attack was a "despicable" war crime meant to stifle diplomacy.
"In my opinion this is Sharon's effort to torpedo any effort to revive the peace process," he said.
Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza in the 1967 Middle East war and handed over the main towns to Palestinian self-rule under interim peace deals in 1994 to 1995. But Israeli troops and Jewish settlements are present in swathes of the territories.
In a statement confirming and defending the air raid, the Israeli army said: "Shehada was behind hundreds of terrorist attacks carried out over the past two years against the Israeli military and Israeli civilians in Israel."
A senior Hamas official vowed revenge for "this is a massacre against our people. Retaliation is coming and everything is considered a target.
"Hamas's retaliation will come very soon, and there won't be only just one [attack] ... After this crime, even Israelis in their homes will be the target of our operations."
An estimated 100,000 Palestinians marched in the funeral procession yesterday afternoon for those killed in the attack. They carried the bodies of the victims wrapped in Palestinian flags on stretchers.
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