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100,000 Gazans Told to Flee as Both Sides Press Attacks Gaza Invasion Is Likely, Israeli Official Says
(about 1 hour later)
JERUSALEM — Israeli forces intensified their assaults on targets in Gaza on Wednesday, bombing the residences of several Hamas leaders and warning 100,000 Gazans to flee their homes ahead of more attacks. The Gaza death toll from nine days of conflict vaulted past 200, including at least four children killed on a beach from what Palestinian officials called an Israeli gunboat shell. JERUSALEM — A senior Israeli military official said Wednesday the likelihood of a ground invasion of the Gaza Strip was “very high,” and that “if you want to efficiently fight terrorism you must be present, boots on the ground.”
The Israelis said their missile defense system had intercepted four rockets over the Tel Aviv area, as any hope for a cease-fire under an Egyptian proposal that had been briefly embraced by Israel on Tuesday — but not by its militant adversaries seemed to fade further. Hamas, the dominant militant group in Gaza, announced Wednesday that it had formally rejected the Egyptian proposal, with no explanation. The official, who has been briefing Israeli ministers who make strategic decisions, said his assessment was based on “the signals I get” and the diminishing returns of aerial bombardment after nine days. He said an Israeli takeover of Gaza is “not a huge challenge,” estimating it would take “a matter of days or weeks,” but that preventing a more dangerous devolution in the coastal enclave would require an occupation “of many months.”
Israel’s bomb warnings to Gazans, distributed by leaflets, automated telephone calls and text messages, were the broadest yet and advised people in northern towns as well as some neighborhoods of Gaza City to head south. “The I.D.F. does not want to harm you, and your families,” the leaflets said, using the abbreviation for the Israel Defense Forces. “Whoever disregards these instructions and fails to evacuate immediately endangers their own lives, as well as those of their families,” the warning added. “Every day that passes makes the possibility more evident,” the official told a handful of international journalists in a briefing at the military’s Tel Aviv headquarters. “We can hurt them very hard from the air but not get rid of them.” He spoke on the condition of anonymity under military protocol.
Israel said it had struck 39 targets in Gaza overnight. Witnesses in Gaza said that a new, five-story headquarters of the Interior Ministry was reduced to rubble and that the strikes had also hit the homes of Mahmoud al-Zahar, a senior Hamas leader; Fathi Hamad, the movement’s former interior minister; Ismail al-Ashqar, a member of the defunct Parliament; and Bassem Naim, an adviser to the former prime minister of Gaza, Ismail Haniya. The stark assessment came as Israel bombed 60 targets, most of them in northern Gaza, after warning 100,000 residents to evacuate their homes by 8 a.m. via leaflets, text messages, and automated telephone calls. The Palestinian death toll reached at least 205 by late afternoon, including four children killed in a strike on the seashore; a late-afternoon funeral was scheduled for the lone Israeli casualty, a 37-year-old man killed by a mortar as he distributed food to soldiers Tuesday night near the Erez crossing to Gaza.
“They are key players in the decision-making of Hamas’s terrorist machine,” Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, a military spokesman, said in an interview. Scores of rockets from Gaza continued to fly into Israel, several of them intercepted by the Iron Dome missile-defense system over Tel Aviv and the southern city of Ashkelon. Hamas, the militant Palestinian faction that dominates Gaza, on Wednesday officially rejected an Egyptian cease-fire proposal that Israel had initially approved Tuesday morning. Israeli news outlets reported that Hamas had made its own proposal, offering 10 years of quiet in exchange for the full reopening of Gaza border crossings and the release of 50 Palestinians who were recently rearrested after been released in a 2011 exchange for a captured Israeli soldier.
The Palestinian death toll passed 201 on Wednesday, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, after a strike on a car in the southern town of Khan Younis killed three people. At least eight people were killed overnight, among them a 5-year-old girl who fell from a high spot. President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority was meeting with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt in Cairo on Wednesday to discuss cease-fire terms.
Later in the day, at least four children playing on a Gaza beach were killed, according to witnesses. A Palestinian health official quoted by Reuters said the children had been attacked by an Israeli gunboat. There was no immediate comment from the Israel Defense Forces. But in Israel, Tuesday’s cautious embrace of a truce had been replaced by increasing chatter about the possibility of an imminent ground operation, as the government moved to call up 8,000 additional reservists, adding to the 42,000 already mobilized.
In Israel, a funeral was set for Wednesday afternoon for the only Israeli killed so far in the latest outbreak of Israel-Gaza hostilities, the worst in two years. The Israeli victim, Dror Khenin, 37, was fatally wounded by a mortar shell Tuesday night while he was distributing food to soldiers near a border crossing into Gaza. Mark Regev, spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said Wednesday that an invasion of Gaza was “definitely an option.”
“I call for securing the safety of the citizens of Israel,” said the Israeli foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, Israeli radio reported. “To the best of my understanding, it is not possible to ensure summer vacation, a normal summer for our kids without a ground operation in Gaza” “It’s being discussed — I can’t go beyond that,” he said. Asked about the military official’s characterization of the likelihood as “very high,” Mr. Regev said, “That’s a professional opinion of the military.” Then he added, “But you can be assured that opinion was expressed by the military to the political wing.”
“We don’t need to rule Gaza, or build settlements in Gaza,” he added. “We need to ensure that all Hamas terrorists run away, are imprisoned or will die.” Mr. Netanyahu has been under pressure from some members of his cabinet and party to start a ground operation. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who has been at turns partner and rival to the prime minister, reiterated his call for a more substantial operation against Hamas on Wednesday, as did Yuval Steinitz, the minister of strategic affairs, who has been a Netanyahu stalwart and frequent mouthpiece.
Shortly after Mr. Lieberman made his statement, he was forced to seek shelter while meeting with his Norwegian counterpart, Borge Brende, in the city of Ashkelon, according to Ynet, an online Israeli news outlet. After sirens sounded, Ynet reported, a rocket exploded nearby. “To the best of my understanding, it is not possible to ensure summer vacation, a normal summer for our kids, without a ground operation in Gaza,” Mr. Lieberman said during a visit to Ashkelon, where he and his entourage had to run for cover at one point as sirens warned of incoming rockets, which were intercepted and destroyed by the Iron Dome system in dramatic fashion.
The current escalation followed rising tension related to the June 12 abduction and killing of three Israeli teenagers who were hitchhiking home from their schools in the occupied West Bank — Israel blamed Hamas for their deaths — and the July 2 kidnapping and killing of a 16-year-old Palestinian in East Jerusalem, which the Israeli authorities say was a revenge attack by extremist Jews. “We don’t need to rule Gaza, or build settlements in Gaza,” he added. “We need to ensure that all Hamas terrorists run away, are imprisoned, or die.”
President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, whose April reconciliation with Hamas helped lead to the collapse of American-brokered peace talks with Israel, was scheduled to meet on Wednesday with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt regarding the proposed cease-fire. Mr. Abbas planned to travel to Turkey for similar talks on Friday. Mr. Steinitz, for his part, said in a radio interview that it was possible Israel would begin a ground campaign in the next few days if rocket fire continued, and urged a takeover of Gaza for a few weeks to demilitarize it, topple Hamas and pave the way to “something else.”
It was unclear how many Gazans were heeding the Israeli military’s call for evacuations; Hamas has urged people to stay put, calling the warnings “psychological warfare.” In the densely populated and poor neighborhoods of Zeitoun and Shejaya in Gaza City, many people appeared confused, with some seeking shelter in friends’ homes deeper inside the neighborhoods rather than leaving. But the senior military official said it would not be so simple.
“We don’t know where we’re going, we’re going aimlessly,” said Mohammed Dalul, who was driving a donkey cart with his six children and an elderly neighbor. They carried only a canister of cooking gas and a single bag of clothes for the children. “Nobody is looking after us,” said the neighbor, Naziha Rukhneh. “We estimate that sitting there and eliminating Hamas terrorism from the Gaza Strip is a matter of many months — it’s not a matter of two or three months, it’s much more than that,” he said. “We have a very good idea of what does it mean to take over Gaza Strip in all aspects — military, civilian, infrastructure, economical — we have a very good idea and I think it’s one of the issues that the Israeli government should consider very seriously.
The streets were emptier than normal, but a few children flew kites and some men sat in the shade. Around noon, eight rockets were launched simultaneously from nearby; a few minutes later, the sound of a warplane was followed by that of a bomb dropping. “That’s a huge burden on anybody who would do it,” he added. “Everything has its own prices.”
Ahmed Salim said that he had ignored the general evacuation warning, though he had heeded a personalized one three days ago when it was sent to his brother’s cellphone; a strike hit the house 10 minutes later, said Mr. Salim, who is now staying with a neighbor. The official said the military has a variety of operational plans, including a full re-occupation of Gaza, which Israel seized in the 1967 war and withdrew settlers and soldiers from in 2005, but also “taking specific parts of the strip, taking places with tunnels, places with rockets.”
“All of it, the four stories, are flattened,” he said. “All I have is the clothes I am wearing.” The current campaign began July 7 amid mounting tension since the June 12 abduction and killing of three Israeli teenagers who were hitchhiking home from their yeshivas in the occupied West Bank — a crime Israel blamed on Hamas — and the July 2 kidnap and killing of a Palestinian 16-year-old in Jerusalem, which the authorities say was a revenge attack by Jewish extremists. It is Israel’s third major military operation in Gaza in six years.
A Human Rights Watch report released on Wednesday cited United Nations data showing that, as of Monday, more than three-quarters of the Palestinians killed were civilians, including 36 children, and that approximately 7,500 people had been displaced by the destruction of 1,255 homes. The Human Rights Watch report investigated four Israeli strikes – on the Fun Time Beach cafe in the southern city of Khan Younis; on a car carrying municipal workers in the Bureij refugee camp; and two on homes where victims included a pregnant woman and small children. By Wednesday, Israel had struck more than 1,800 sites in Gaza, topping the 1,500 targets of its eight-day campaign in November 2012. Among the early-morning targets were a new five-story headquarters of the Interior Ministry that witnesses said was reduced to rubble, and the homes of several Hamas leaders: Mahmoud al-Zahar, a frequent international spokesman; Fathi Hamad, the former interior minister; Ismail al-Ashqar, a member of the defunct Parliament; and Bassem Naim, an adviser to the former prime minister, Ismail Haniya.
“Israel’s rhetoric is all about precision attacks, but attacks with no military target and many civilian deaths can hardly be considered precise,” Sarah Leah Whitson, the Middle East director of Human Rights Watch, said in the report. “Recent documented cases in Gaza sadly fit Israel’s long record of unlawful airstrikes with high civilian casualties.” The Israeli leaflets dropped in northern Gaza and some neighborhoods of Gaza City warned, “Whoever disregards these instructions and fails to evacuate immediately endangers their own lives, as well as those of their families.”
The report also criticized Israel’s tactic of warning residents to evacuate, saying it “does not make an otherwise unlawful attack lawful.” It was unclear how many Gaza residents were heeding the call; Hamas has urged people to stay put, calling the warnings “psychological warfare.”
Asked about the report, Colonel Lerner said Human Rights Watch was “ignoring the fact that Hamas is deeply embedded in an underground Gaza Strip,” referring to tunnels that he said were used to launch rockets. He said more than half the targets of the current operation had been concealed rocket launchers. In the densely populated and poor neighborhoods of Zeitoun and Shejaya in Gaza City, streets were emptier than usual, but a few children flew kites and some men sat in the shade. Many people appeared confused, with some seeking shelter in friends’ homes deeper inside the neighborhoods rather than leaving.
“We don’t know where we’re going, we’re going aimlessly,” said Mohammed Dalul, who was driving a donkey cart with his six children and an elderly neighbor. They had with them only a canister of cooking gas and a single bag of clothes for the children. “Nobody is looking after us,” said the neighbor, Naziha Rukhneh.
Around noon, eight rockets were launched simultaneously from nearby; a few minutes later, the sound of a warplane was followed by that of a bomb dropping.
The senior Israeli military official said the campaign had entered “a higher level of operation” but not yet diverted from its original stated goals — to restore quiet, not to rout Hamas or conquer Gaza.
“The point will be the exact time when the Israeli government will decide we are going to change method,” he said. “When they feel the current method or the current concept is no longer working for them, I believe they will order the military to do something else.”
The official noted: “A ground campaign will be much messier.”