Israel, Hamas trade deadly fire
Airstrikes, rockets kill dozens as escalating conflict terrorizes millions
ASHKELON, Israel — The worst fighting between Israelis and Palestinians in seven years intensified Tuesday night, as Israeli airstrikes began targeting Hamas offices in Gaza City and militants in Gaza fired rockets at the metropolis of Tel Aviv, the southern city of Ashkelon and Israel’s main airport.
In Gaza, at least 30 Palestinians, including 10 children, had been killed by Tuesday night, and 203 others were wounded, according to health officials. In Israel, three people were killed in strikes on Tel Aviv and the seaside city of Ashkelon, and at least 100 were wounded, according to medical officials.
Away from the military conflict, a wave of civil unrest spread across Arab neighborhoods as Palestinian citizens of Israel expressed fury at the killings in Gaza and
long-standing complaints of discrimination inside Israel itself.
While the surge in strikes, the worst since 2014, brought fear to millions in Gaza and Israel, they nevertheless bolstered an unlikely pair: Hamas, the Islamist militant group that runs the Gaza Strip, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.
For Hamas, the conflict has allowed it to revitalize its claims to the leadership of Palestinian resistance. It framed its rockets as a direct response to a pair of Israeli police raids on the Aqsa Mosque compound, a religious site in East Jerusalem sacred to both Muslims and Jews. In the process, the group presented itself as a protector of Palestinian protesters and worshippers in the city.
For Netanyahu, the distraction of the war, and the divisions it creates between the disparate opposition parties currently negotiating a coalition to topple him from power, have given him half a chance of remaining in office, just days after it seemed like he might finally be on the way out.
“It is the story of every previous war between Israel and Hamas,” said Ghassan Khatib, a politics expert at Birzeit University in the occupied West Bank. Both governments “come out of it victorious, and the public of Gaza comes out of it as losers.”
Both sides seized on the charged symbolism of the holy city. The Israeli military codenamed its operation Guardians of the Walls, a reference to the ancient ramparts of the Old City of Jerusalem. The militants had their own code name: Sword of Jerusalem.
For the victims of the violence, the first 36 hours of the renewed conflict brought little but terror and loss. The Palestinian militants and Israeli military are unevenly matched — the former armed with rockets, the latter with fighter jets and a sophisticated antimissile defense system, the Iron Dome, partly financed by the United States.
Israeli airstrikes aim for strategic targets in densely populated Gaza, killing civilians even as Israel insists it takes measures to avoid them. Hamas’ rockets, on the other hand, aim for civilian population centers but often miss the mark.
Osama Soboh, a 31-year-old civil servant in Gaza City, lost his mother, Amira, and brother, Abdelrahman, when an Israeli strike on their apartment block — aimed at a militant leader — also took out his family.
Soboh questioned why Israel had targeted a civilian building. “It’s not a military barracks, it’s not posing any danger to Israel,” he said. “This was an old woman with a child with cerebral palsy.”
Thirteen miles to the north, in a sleepy suburb of Ashkelon, in Israel, a grandmother trod across the shards of glass and detritus left by a Hamas rocket that had sliced through her apartment block.
“What have I done wrong?” asked Maria Nagiv, 61, a former soldier who was born in Ukraine. “I didn’t do anything and they still send us bombs.”
In Gaza and Israel, the rockets and airstrikes reached an intensity considered rare for this early stage in a conflict here.
In Gaza, Israeli pilots quickly moved on from solely military targets, turning Tuesday to an apartment block said to house the home of a leading militant, and a tower block housing offices of several Hamas officials.
An Israeli military spokesperson, Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, said early Tuesday that 15 militants had been killed in strikes by jets and unmanned drones.
As multiple salvos of rockets streaked out of Gaza in rapid succession, one hit a school in Ashkelon. The school was empty because Israeli authorities had ordered all schools within 25 miles of Gaza closed in anticipation of rockets.
A giant fire raged on the outskirts of the city, where an oil facility was hit.
Unrest also broke out among Palestinian citizens of Israel, who were angered by the strikes on Gaza, the raid on the Aqsa compound and the looming expulsion of several Palestinian families from their homes in Jerusalem. Protesters waving Palestinian flags gathered in several Arab towns across Israel, some of them burning cars and Jewish properties.
Palestinians rampaged in the mixed city of Lod, where a state of emergency was declared early Wednesday. Protesters set fire to a synagogue and dozens of cars. One Palestinian man was fatally shot.
The war also gives Netanyahu political breathing space.
Netanyahu’s opponents have three weeks to cobble together an unlikely coalition — and their success depends on far-right Jewish politicians and Arab Islamists putting aside fundamental differences to join forces in government.
But a war with Gaza makes that less likely, since it becomes far harder for Arab politicians, who oppose confrontations with Gaza, to find common cause with right-wingers who firmly back military action.
Mansour Abbas, an Islamist politician whose party holds the balance of parliamentary power, canceled coalition talks Monday, as military escalation appeared inevitable. And Defense Minister Benny Gantz, who has pledged to oust Netanyahu, is now distracted by the war effort.
Netanyahu, also sounding a note of defiance, suggested the hostilities might not end any time soon.
“Hamas and Islamic Jihad have paid, and will pay, a very heavy price for their aggression,” he declared in a late-night address. “This campaign will take time.”
But among civilians left grieving by the conflict, these political questions meant little.
In Beit Hanoun, northern Gaza, the al-Masri family buried two young boys who were killed Monday evening.
Ibrahim, 11, and Marwan, 7, had been playing outside their home when a missile struck, according to their uncle, Bashir alMasri, 25.
For al-Masri, the attack showed that Israel had no concern for civilian life.
“They target buildings with children, they target ambulances, they target schools,” he said by telephone. “And all the world, beginning with America, says that people in Gaza are terrorists. But we are not terrorists. We just want to live in peace.”
On Tuesday night, it was impossible to predict when that would come.
Conricus said Tuesday that the military’s air campaign was still in its “early stages.”