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Israel Begins Ground Assault of Gaza Strip Israeli Military Invades Gaza, With Sights Set On Hamas Operations
(about 3 hours later)
JERUSALEM — Israel began a ground invasion into the Gaza Strip shortly after 10 Thursday night, saying it would target tunnels that infiltrate its territory, after cease-fire talks failed to de-escalate the air war that has raged for 10 days. JERUSALEM — Israeli tanks rolled into the northern Gaza Strip on Thursday night and naval gunboats pounded targets in the south as Israel began a ground invasion after 10 days of aerial bombardment failed to stop Palestinian militants from showering Israeli cities with rockets.
The military released a statement saying the goal of the operation was to “establish a reality in which Israeli residents can live in safety and security without continuous indiscriminate terror.” Israeli leaders said the incursion was a limited one focused on tunnels into its territory like the one used for a predawn attack Thursday that was thwarted. They said it was not intended to topple Hamas, the militant Islamist movement, from its longtime rule of Gaza.
Palestinian residents and foreign journalists in Gaza reported heavy artillery fire from ground troops in the north and from Israeli naval gunboats stationed near Gaza’s port, as well as a continuing air assault. Residents in the northern Gaza Strip said they could hear the sound of tanks entering from Beit Lahiya. As rockets continued to rain down on Israeli cities, a military spokesman said the mission’s expansion was “not time bound” and was aimed to ensure Hamas operatives were “pursued, paralyzed and threatened” as it targeted “terrorist infrastructure” in the north, south and east of Gaza “in parallel.”
Along the Gaza City seafront the sounds of war were intensifying Thursday night. There was a near-constant staccato of gunboats firing artillery in bursts of five blasts, sending flashes above the dark sea. The thunderlike rumble of impact could be occasionally heard inland. F-16s whooshed over the city, followed by the thud of their strikes. Behind it all was the high-pitched, ambient hum of drones, heard even over the call to prayer from the mosques. As midnight approached Thursday, residents of some sparsely populated farmland in northern Gaza were cowering in their homes, afraid to answer mobile phones or peek out windows. Some sent text messages reporting that they could hear tank shelling, heavy artillery, and F-16s dropping bombs. Moussa al-Ghoul, 63, who lives northwest of Beit Lahiya, said his neighborhood had turned into “a war zone” with tanks surrounding his home, having destroyed those of two of his sons. He said shells were landing “everywhere.”
Fawzi Barhoum, a spokesman for Hamas, the Islamic militant group that governs the Gaza Strip, issued a statement calling the invasion “a dangerous step,” and said, referring to Israel, “The occupation will pay its price expensively, and Hamas is ready for confrontation.” Gaza news outlets reported that electricity had been cut to 80 percent of the coastal territory after cables bringing power from Israel were damaged.
The Israeli strikes hit a range of targets, including a rehabilitation hospital, and earlier killed four young children as they played on a roof in eastern Gaza City. At the same time, scores of rockets from Gaza continued to stream into cities all over central and southern Israel. After the early-morning tunnel episode, the day settled into an extended calm as both sides abided a United Nations request for a five-hour humanitarian pause in the fighting. But by 3 p.m., the violence roared back as the Palestinian death toll neared 250 and more than 120 rockets rained on cities throughout southern and central Israel all afternoon and evening.
The hostilities quickly resumed at the end of a five-hour humanitarian window both sides had agreed to early Thursday. “We will strike Hamas and we are determined to restore peace to the state of Israel,” the military spokesman, Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, told reporters in a conference call. “It will progress according to the situation assessment and according to our crafted and designed plan of action to enable us to carry out this mission.”
A military spokesman, Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, said the next stage of Israel’s Operation Protective Edge would penetrate the north, east and south of Gaza with ground forces. He said it was not aimed at toppling Hamas from its longtime rule of Gaza, but would “make sure that the Hamas terrorists will be pursued, paralyzed and threatened” by the force of the Israel Defense Forces. Israel began to draft 18,000 reservists, adding to 50,000 already mobilized in recent days; Colonel Lerner said the ground forces would include infantry and artillery units, armored and engineer corps, supported by Israel’s “vast intelligence capabilities,” air force and navy.
“We will be striking the infrastructure, we will be striking the operatives, in order to safeguard the citizens of Israel,” Colonel Lerner told reporters in an 11 p.m. conference call. “The I.D.F. is not bound by a time frame. We are operating to implement our goals.” Fawzi Barhoum, a spokesman for Hamas, called the invasion “a dangerous step.”
Colonel Lerner said that additional reservists would be mobilized, adding to the 50,000 already called up for the operation, and that the ground forces in Gaza would include infantry, artillery, armored corps and engineering corps, supported by Israel’s “vast intelligence capabilities” and aerial and naval bombardment. “The occupation will pay its price expensively,” he said in a statement, referring to Israel, “and Hamas is ready for confrontation.”
Asked what Gaza residents should do to stay safe during the invasion, Colonel Lerner said: “Refrain and keep away from Hamas terrorists. Keep away from the infrastructure which is being used against the state of Israel. That’s the best advice we can give them.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel did not make a public statement Thursday night, but several of his ministers said on television that a unanimous cabinet had authorized Mr. Netanyahu and the defense minister a few days ago to send in ground troops when they deemed necessary.
The office of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said in a statement that the ground incursion had the approval of the Israeli cabinet and that the prime minister and the defense minister, had instructed the military “to be ready to broaden the ground operation.” “With a heavy heart we embarked on this operation, in order to destroy the tunnels, as just this morning we have seen their deadly potential,” said Naftali Bennett, the economy minister and leader of the right-wing Jewish Home party. “Difficult days are ahead of us,” he added. “We are also operating against the rockets and all of the existing threats, but the No. 1 target is the tunnels.”
The statement added that the ground incursion came after Israeli forces thwarted an infiltration into Israel through a tunnel from Gaza early Thursday, averting what it said would have been “a mass terrorist attack against Israeli civilians.” Israel did not send ground troops into Gaza during eight days of cross border violence in 2012. It was condemned internationally for an intense three-week air-and-ground campaign in 2008-9, when 1,400 Palestinians were killed along with 13 Israelis in fierce street fighting. Israel originally seized the territory in the Six-Day War in 1967 and evacuated its settlers and soldiers in 2005, but maintained restrictions on imports, exports and travel for the Palestinians left behind.
It also comes after Israel accepted an Egyptian proposal for a cease-fire that was rejected by Hamas, which continued to fire rockets at Israel. The Israeli statement said, adding, “In light of the constant and criminal aggression of Hamas and its dangerous infiltration into Israeli territory, Israel is obligated to act to defend its citizens.” The military operation started about 10 p.m., hours after Israel bombed a rehabilitation hospital and another airstrike killed four children playing on a Gaza City rooftop — an echo of the previous day’s bombing that left four young children, all cousins, dead on a beach.
The humanitarian pause, requested by the United Nations, came after Israel foiled the predawn attack on the tunnel. It was interrupted by a brief flurry of mortar shells fired from Gaza that fell in open ground near the Gaza border, but otherwise the quiet held from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., allowing Gaza residents to safely come out of their homes to shop and survey the damage the battle had wrought. At the Al-Wafa Rehabilitation Hospital in Gaza City, most but not all of the 17 patients and 25 doctors and nurses were evacuated before the electricity was cut and heavy bombardments nearly destroyed the building, doctors said.
With the Palestinian death toll exceeding 220, many of them civilians, Israel and Hamas agreed to the suspension of hostilities at the request of the United Nations. One Israeli has been killed. “We evacuated them under fire,” said Dr. Ali Abu Ryala, a hospital spokesman. “Nurses and doctors had to carry the patients on their backs, some of them falling off the stairway. There is an unprecedented state of panic in the hospital.”
The incursion into Israel at 4:30 a.m. was the first through a tunnel during the current hostilities. Along the Gaza City seafront, as tanks entered the north, there was a near-constant staccato of gunboats firing in bursts of five blasts each, sending flashes above the dark water. They were shelling a target south of Gaza’s port, the red lights of their barrels visible from shore, the impact of their artillery echoing a second later.
Colonel Lerner noted that Israel had uncovered four other tunnels from Gaza over the last 18 months and said, “We are concerned with this and we are operating in order to strike those capabilities.” Earlier, warplanes whooshed over the city as they have for more than a week, and the high-pitched hum of drones could be heard over the call to prayer from mosques to end the daily fast during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
Earlier on Thursday, Palestinian, Egyptian, Israeli and American officials said intense discussions were underway on terms for a cease-fire, but none was willing to be quoted by name. A high-level Israeli delegation returned from Cairo, where President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority and Tony Blair, the envoy of the so-called Quartet of Middle East peacemakers, met Wednesday with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt. “Communications with Gaza have become problematic” since the ground invasion, said a statement from Christopher Gunness of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which provides health care, education, and other services for the more than half of Gaza’s 1.7 million residents, who are classified as Palestinian refugees. The agency is currently sheltering thousands who evacuated their homes. “We urgently appeal for restraint so that civilians who have suffered enough in this appalling conflict do not suffer further,” Mr. Gunness said.
“The effort to achieve an end of the violence is ongoing,” said one senior Israeli official. “We’re not there yet.” Brig. Gen. Moti Almoz, chief spokesman of Israel’s military, said on television, “I will now, uncharacteristically, ask the residents of Gaza to move away from the areas our forces are operating in — they are operating with extreme force.”
. The United Nations estimates that about three-quarters of those killed so far were civilians, not militants, and about 50 of them children. Palestinian health officials said at least 17 youths died in airstrikes on Wednesday and Thursday, raising sharp new questions about civilian deaths.
An Israeli military spokesman said the militants were attacked from the air, and it was not immediately clear whether all had been killed. Residents of the Israeli border community nearest the exit of the tunnel, kibbutz Sufa, were told to stay in their homes for several hours after the initial confrontation. Relatives collapsed in grief around sunset at Shifa Hospital, where the four children who had been killed on the rooftop — twin brothers Jihad and Wissam Shuheiber, 8; their cousin Afnan, 10; and a friend, Yassin Al-Himidi, 4 — laid on a single table in the morgue, their bodies deceptively intact. One of the boys wore only his underpants, decorated with superheroes.
Even during the humanitarian pause, many streets in Gaza remained quiet though people were unsure how safe things would remain, mindful of how a previous proposed cease-fire on Tuesday had broken down after just a few hours. On the beach near Gaza City’s small fishing harbor, where four boys were killed by an Israeli airstrike as they played on Wednesday, children who often played there had not returned. The military, which on Wednesday issued a statement describing bombing on the beach bombing that also killed children as having a “tragic outcome,” declined to offer an explanation for Thursday’s 6 p.m. strike on the Gaza City rooftop. Israeli officials say they take precautions to avoid hitting civilians but that Hamas makes it hard by firing rockets from residential areas and discouraging residents from evacuating their homes.
The Health Ministry in Gaza reported three Palestinian fatalities early Thursday. The dead included a man killed in an airstrike on a house in Beit Lahiya; another man, 67, who was killed in a strike while on his way to the mosque for the dawn prayer in Rafah in the south; and a woman, 71, who died of injuries she sustained in an earlier strike in Khan Younis. “We don’t need statements of regret from Israel,” Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch said in a Twitter message. “We need investigation and an end to the killing.”
Eyal Brandeis, a member of kibbutz Sufa, said the residents received text messages about 4:30 a.m. telling them to stay in their houses. “From the sound of the explosions we understood this was a grave incident,” he said by telephone. Soon the residents were told that there was a suspected infiltration effort by militants. Shortly before 10 a.m. they were told they could go back to their normal routines. It had been a roller-coaster day, starting with Israel’s early-morning report that it had foiled the attack through the tunnel at about 4:30 a.m. by striking from the air at 13 Palestinians who emerged from it and tried to infiltrate a kibbutz, the first time that had happened in the current conflagration. Colonel Lerner said later that the incursion “illustrates the clear and immediate threat we have from the Gaza Strip,” and noted that Israel had uncovered four similar tunnels into its territory over the last 18 months.
The United Nations said Thursday that it had discovered 20 rockets hidden in a vacant school in Gaza during a regular inspection on Wednesday. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which assists Palestinian refugees, called the use of a school to hide weaponry a “flagrant violation” of international law protecting civilians. The humanitarian pause urged by the United Nations started at 10 a.m., and Gaza residents filled the streets, shopping for food and toys and crowding cash machines open for the first time since the operation began. But the lull was pierced around noon by a brief flurry of mortars fired from Gaza, with rockets fired toward Israel precisely at 3 p.m., the designated endpoint of the lull. The strikes continued through the afternoon and evening.
“This incident, which is the first of its kind in Gaza, endangered civilians including staff and put at risk Unrwa’s vital mission to assist and protect Palestine refugees in Gaza,” the agency said in a statement. Israel shot down a drone near Ashkelon, not far from its border with Gaza, the second unmanned aerial vehicle sent aloft by Gaza this week.
Agency officials notified Palestinian and Israeli authorities of the discovery and took steps to remove the rockets. The agency said it was beginning a full investigation of the incident. At one point, there was word from Egypt that an agreement had been reached for a cease-fire starting at 6 a.m. Friday. Instead, the violence only increased.
Also on Thursday, the Israeli authorities formally indicted three Israelis suspected of having killed a 16-year-old Palestinian boy in Jerusalem. Officials said they believed that the killing was carried out to avenge the abduction and murder of three young Israelis last month. “We have to look at this as an operation in stages: its first stage was attacks from the air and sea, and this is the second stage, where we reach contact with the Hamas,” Eli Marom, commander of Israel’s Navy from 2007 to 2011, said on Israel’s Channel 2 News. “You have to understand this is a long campaign. This is only its second stage, and there can be other stages.”
Michael B. Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to Washington, said in a late-night interview that Mr. Netanyahu had “exercised extraordinary restraint up until now” by not engaging ground troops and “paid a heavy political price for it.” Thursday’s tunnel attack, he said, “was a game changer,” adding, “Essentially, Hamas invaded Israel first.”
In contrast to the Iron Dome missile-defense system that Israel says has stopped some 300 rockets from hitting populated areas over the last 10 days, Mr. Oren said, “We don’t have a response to the tunnels.”
He added, “They are reinforced concrete tunnels, basically impregnable from the air and their openings are camouflaged.”
Amos Yadlin, director of Israel’s Institution for National Security Studies and former chief of military intelligence, similarly said in a radio interview earlier Thursday that the tunnel attack “clarified to those who were still wondering if it was right to conduct a ground move against certain points.”
A senior Israeli military official put it this way at a recent briefing, “Actually there are two Gazas: one above the ground and another under the ground.”