Israel, Hamas trade threats as war rages
The death toll tops 120 in Gaza — and a single related casualty in Israel — as troops mass for possible invasion and Hamas warns it will kidnap soldiers if Netanyahu launches ground attack
HAMAS leaders issued a blunt warning to Israel against invading the Gaza Strip by promising that it would exploit any ground incursion to kidnap Israeli soldiers.
The threat came as 16 Palestinians were killed in Israeli air strikes on the Gaza Strip early yesterday and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu considered sending thousands of troops to the tiny coastal enclave.
The latest casualties brought the number killed to about 120 — many of them non-combatants, including at least 23 children, according to Gaza health officials — since Israel launched Operation Protective Edge this week with the aim of stopping rockets being fired by militants.
About 33 000 Israeli reservists have been mobilised and are poised near the Gaza frontier in southern Israel with tanks and artillery for an invasion order that could signal an even bloodier conflict.
Navi Pillay, the UN high commissioner for human rights,
No international pressure will prevent us from acting with all power. We are weighing all possibilities and preparing for all possibilities
criticised Israel’s practice of targeting houses used by known militants, saying it contravened international law — in contrast to Israeli claims — and had displaced 2 000 people.
Netanyahu issued a stern riposte, saying international condemnation would not deter Israel from “striking the terrorists who are attacking us”.
Asked whether Israel might move from the mostly aerial attacks of the past four days to a ground war in Gaza to stop militant rocket fire, Netanyahu replied: “We are weighing all possibilities and preparing for all possibilities.”
A day after a phone call with US President Barack Obama about the worst flare-up in Israeli-Palestinian violence in almost two years, Netanyahu said: “No international pressure will prevent us from acting with all power.”
Washington affirmed Israel’s right to defend itself in a statement from the Pentagon on Friday. But US Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel told Israeli De- fence Minister Moshe Ya’alon that he was concerned “about the risk of further escalation and emphasised the need for all sides to do everything they can to protect civilian lives and restore calm”, said a Pentagon statement.
Fawzeh Barhoom, a Hamas spokesman, said if Israel launched a ground offensive, it would only make it easier to abduct Israeli troops, whom the movement would use as bargaining chips to wring concessions from Israel.
“If they launch a ground war, they will be shortening the path for us to kidnap many soldiers in order to make a deal to end the bloodshed and release the detainees, as happened in the past,” he said, referring to the 2006 kidnapping of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier who was held in Gaza for five years before his release in 2011 in exchange for more than 1 000 Palestinian prisoners.
The kidnap threat was reinforced by Ihab al-Ghussain, Gaza’s deputy information minister and a Hamas member, who called it “a normal response” to Israel’s actions.
“They are coming to us,” he said. “Israel started this, so I will do whatever I can to stop it, even if it means kidnapping Israelis. You are talking about
We warn you against carrying out flights to Ben-Gurion airport. [It] will be one of our targets today
thousands of Palestinians in [Israeli] prisons for whom the peace process did nothing. The only way we can help these people is to kidnap Israelis and get these people out of jail.”
The prospect of kidnapping was certain to touch a raw nerve among Israel’s leaders. Last month, three Israeli teenagers were abducted in the West Bank and later found murdered — a crime Israel blamed on Hamas, which neither confirmed nor denied responsibility.
The threat to Israel followed a warning from Hamas’s military wing, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, that it would fire on its neighbour’s main international airport, near Tel Aviv, in the next phase of its rocket offensive.
“The armed wing of the Hamas movement has decided to respond to the Israeli aggression and we warn you against carrying out flights to Ben Gurion Airport, which will be one of our targets today because it also hosts a military air base,” said the brigades.
Diplomatic efforts to end the conflict and prevent further escalation seemed to be falling on stony ground, despite an offer by Obama to help to mediate a ceasefire.
Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority leader, urged the UN to negotiate a truce, but Egypt — which was being asked to mediate, having helped to broker a ceasefire that ended an earlier conflict in November 2012 — accused both sides of being “stubborn”.
Israel said it hoped Operation Protective Edge would stop rockets being fired by militants in Gaza. There was little sign this weekend of that goal having been achieved as missiles continued to hit Israeli towns and cities. One struck a petrol station in Ashdod, 32km from Gaza, injuring eight people, one of them severely.
There were concerns of a wider conflict when three missiles from Lebanon landed near a kibbutz in Israel’s Galilee region.
So far, the only Israeli casualty has been an elderly woman who collapsed rushing to a bomb shelter and later died. —©