GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Israel stepped up its campaign against Gaza’s ruling Hamas on Thursday, killing three of the group’s senior military commanders in an airstrike that pulverized a four-story home, the second such attack targeting top leaders in two days.
The pinpoint pre-dawn attack on Hamas’ inner sanctum was launched minutes after the men emerged from tunnel hideouts, a security official said — displaying the long reach of Israel’s intelligence services. Israel said the commanders had played a key role in expanding Hamas’ military capabilities in recent years.
Thursday’s strike in the southern Gaza town of Rafah, coupled with an Israeli Cabinet decision to call up 10,000 more reserve soldiers, signaled an escalation in the Israel-Hamas war since Egyptian cease-fire efforts collapsed this week.
Since July 8, fighting has claimed more than 2,000 Palestinian lives, most of them civilians, according to Palestinian officials and the United Nations, and entire neighborhoods of Gaza have been destroyed. Sixty-four Israeli soldiers, two Israeli civilians and a guest worker also have been killed.
Meanwhile, a senior Hamas leader in exile admitted that Hamas was behind the kidnapping and killing of three Israeli teens in the West Bank — the group’s first claim of responsibility for the June attack that triggered an Israeli crackdown and eventually led to the Gaza fighting.
Saleh Arouri told an international conference of Islamic scholars in Turkey on Wednesday that Hamas’ military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, carried out the “heroic operation” with the goal of sparking a new Palestinian uprising in the West Bank.
This week’s resumption of Gaza fighting came after several failed rounds of indirect talks of Israel and Hamas in Cairo.
Egyptian mediators had proposed that in exchange for quiet on the Israel-Gaza border, Israel gradually ease a border blockade it had imposed on Gaza, alongside Egypt, after Hamas seized the territory in 2007. Hamas rejected the proposal, saying Israel didn’t offer anything specific.
Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas held talks Thursday in Qatar with his main Palestinian rival, Khaled Mashaal, the top Hamas leader in exile. Abbas lost control of Gaza in the Hamas takeover in 2007, but several months ago signed a reconciliation deal with Hamas that was to give him a new foothold in the territory.
During the Cairo talks, Abbas confidants in a joint delegation with Hamas had urged the Islamic militants to accept the Egyptian offer, without success. Some in the Abbas camp had pointed fingers at Mashaal and his host and backer, Qatar.
At the United Nations, three European countries — Britain, Germany and France — were working on a Security Council resolution calling for a Gaza cease-fire and international monitoring to ensure implementation, said a U.N. diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the deliberations.
The European resolution also would include a European offer to take charge of Gaza’s border crossings, along with a deployment there of security forces loyal to Abbas.
The U.S. is working on its own resolution, and high-level talks between European diplomats and U.S. officials were taking place Thursday in Washington, the diplomat said.
Since the breakdown of the Cairo talks late Tuesday, accompanied by the violation of a temporary cease-fire by Gaza militants, cross-border violence has continued at a steady pace.
On Thursday, more than 100 rockets were fired from Gaza, while Israel carried out some 50 airstrikes, the Israeli military said.
In all, at least 26 Palestinians were killed or their bodies recovered Thursday, among them six children, raising the number of Palestinians killed since July 8 to at least 2,086, according to Gaza health official Ashraf al-Kidra. More than 10,400 people have been wounded and some 100,000 left homeless.
An Israeli man also was seriously hurt Thursday, when a mortar shell fired from Gaza exploded outside a kindergarten in southern Israel and shrapnel flew through a window as he celebrated his son’s third birthday.
In Gaza, one of those pulled from the rubble Thursday was Sara Deif, the 5-year-old daughter of Mohammed Deif, the top Hamas military leader who was apparently the target of an airstrike on a three-story home in Gaza City late Tuesday.
Deif’s wife and infant son also were killed in the attack. Hamas said Deif, who has survived four previous attempts on his life, some with serious injuries, was not in the area at the time of the strike.
After Thursday’s airstrike in Rafah, the Hamas military wing announced that three senior commanders, Mohammed Abu Shamaleh, Raed Attar and Mohammed Barhoum, had been killed.
Several hours later, thousands marched through Rafah in a funeral procession, firing guns, waving flags of different militant groups and chanting religious slogans. Those killed were carried aloft through the crowd on stretchers, wrapped in green Hamas flags.
Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, said Israel “will not succeed in breaking the will of our people or weaken the resistance,” and that Israel “will pay the price.”
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised Israel’s Shin Bet security service and its “superior intelligence” for the strike.
Israeli media said Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon authorized the strike. A security official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to reporters, said the three commanders had entered the home just minutes earlier, emerging from underground hideouts.
“We will continue to pursue and strike the heads of Hamas at any time and any place they may be. Whoever tries to harm Israel’s citizens — they are marked for death,” Yaalon said.
Information for this article was contributed by Josef Federman, Yousur Alhlou and Alexandra Olson of The Associated Press.