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Foreign Correspondent
RAMALLAH // The Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, on Wednesday accused Israel of committing “genocide” with its fierce air bombardments of the Gaza Strip.
The two-day assault has killed 45 people, including at least 11 women and children, using a widening campaign of air strikes that Israeli leaders say is necessary to stop militants from launching rockets from the Hamas-controlled territory.
“It’s genocide – the killing of entire families is genocide by Israel against our Palestinian people,” said Mr Abbas during a meeting with senior Palestinian officials yesterday.
At the United Nations, Arab nations called for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council and immediate action to end what Israel’s “outrageous onslaught” against Palestinians.
The Palestinian UN envoy Riyad Mansour and ambassadors representing Arab, Islamic and non-aligned nations met the Security Council president and said afterwards that they expected an urgent meeting to be held very soon.
“We want the Security Council to shoulder its responsibility and stop this aggression against our people,” Mr Mansour said.
The fighting is the worst flare-up between Israel and the Islamist group since they battled for eight days in November 2012. Israel’s Haaretz newspaper cited Palestinian officials as saying that Mr Abbas also was expected to sign off on a request to join the International Criminal Court, where war crimes proceedings could be brought against Israel over its policies towards the Palestinians.
The Palestinian leadership has long threatened to join the ICC, which would likely trigger a harsh response from Israel.
In Gaza, emergency services reported that one strike shortly after midnight on Wednesday in the northern city of Beit Hanoun hit the house of Hafez Hammad, a senior Islamic Jihad commander, killing him and five family members, including two children.
In the central area of the coastal enclave, authorities retrieved from the rubble of a home destroyed by an air raid the body of an 80-year-old woman.
There have been no reports of Israeli casualities from the rocket fire.
Israel’s military reported that its warplanes and warships had struck a total of 550 targets in the Gaza Strip since Operation Protective Edge was launched on Tuesday morning, including 31 tunnels, 60 concealed rocket launchers and weapons caches, as well as what it called “command centres” used by Palestinian fighters.
In the same time, more than 200 rockets fired by militants operating in the territory, which Israel has besieged since 2007, struck Israel, according to the military.
Israeli media reported that rockets fired from Gaza on Wednesday reached the Israeli city of Haifa, more than 160 kilometres north of the Palestinian territory. That would be the farthest north that Gaza-launched missiles have reached. Scores of the rockets have been intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome missile defence system, although statistics on the system’s accuracy are fiercely contested among military experts.
Speaking after a meeting with his security cabinet on Wednesday, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, warned that “Hamas will pay a heavy price for firing toward Israeli citizens”.
He warned that the military operation would “expand and continue until the fire toward our towns stops and quiet returns”.
“The army is ready for all possibilities,” he said.
Israel on Tuesday approved the possibility of mobilising 40,000 troops for a potential ground attack, and the country’s defence minister, Moshe Yaalon, warned that the operation against Hamas “will expand in the coming days, and the price the organisation will pay will be very high”.
The flare-up in violence came after weeks of rising tensions following the killing of three Jewish-settler teenagers in the Israeli-occupied West Bank last month. Israel arrested hundreds of people in the West Bank suspected to be affiliated with Hamas, prompting the Islamist group, which denies involvement in the killings, to respond with rocket fire.
A US official involved in the investigation of the killings told Reuters yesterday said the teenagers were shot at least 10 times with a gun fitted with a silencer. That would give support claims that the killing of Eyal Yifrah, 19, and 16-year-olds Naftali Fraenkel and Gil-Ad Shaerwas premeditated.
“There were 10 gunshots,” said the official, a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent who has coordinated with Israeli authorities in analysing the recording of a telephone call by one of the victims as they were being kidnapped.
The FBI agent said the recording showed what appeared to be the firing of a silenced weapon just after an Arabic-accented voice is heard shouting: “Head down.”
The killing of the three teenagers triggered what is widely believed to be a revenge attack by Jewish extremists who burnt to death Mohammed Abu Khdeir, 17, a Palestinian from East Jerusalem. Six Jewish Israelis were arrested in connection with that murder.
Israel’s fierce bombardments of Gaza come as Hamas appears increasingly weak and incapable of fighting as fiercely against Israel as it has in the past. Known for its campaign of suicide bombings that targeted Israeli civilians in cafes and buses during the second Palestinian uprising that began in 2000, the group is classified as a terrorist organisation by Israel along with the United States and European Union.
Its capabilities appear to have decreased after the Egyptian military’s removal of Mohammed Morsi from the presidency last July. A Muslim Brotherhood member and an ally of Hamas, Mr Morsi had been helping bring the Palestinian group out of its isolation.
That all changed after the military deposed Mr Morsi. It promptly destroyed most if not all the tunnels across the Gaza-Egypt border that had been used to circumvent the Israeli blockade and bring Gazans cheap fuel, medicine and goods.
The destruction of the tunnels also damaged Hamas’s ability to rearm itself with rockets, which Israeli leaders in the current offensive appear to acknowledge.
Peter Lerner, an army spokesman, said Israel’s bombardments had taken a “substantial toll” on Hamas’s rocket arsenal. Vowing to increase the attacks, he said Hamas would “pay for its aggression” and that Israel “is not willing for this situation to continue”.
hnaylor@thenational.ae
* Additional reporting by the Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse