Israel ramps up Gaza campaign

Troop drive ‘bound to fail,’ says Hamas political chief

Israeli tanks roll near the Gaza border Friday. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had ordered the military to prepare for a “significant expansion” of the ground offensive against Hamas.

Israeli tanks roll near the Gaza border Friday. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had ordered the military to prepare for a “significant expansion” of the ground offensive against Hamas.

Saturday, July 19, 2014

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip -- Israeli troops pushed deeper into Gaza on Friday in a ground offensive that officials said could last up to two weeks as the prime minister ordered the military to prepare for a "significantly" wider campaign.

The assault raised risks of a bloodier conflict, with escalating Palestinian civilian casualties and the first Israeli military death -- and brought questions of how far Israel will go to cripple Gaza's Hamas rulers.

Officially, the goal remains to destroy a network of tunnels that militants use to infiltrate Israel and attack civilians. In its first day on the ground in Gaza, the military said it took up positions beyond the border, encountered little resistance from Hamas fighters and made steady progress in destroying the tunnels.

Military officials said the quick work means that within a day or two, Israeli leaders may already have to decide whether to expand the operation.

With calls from Israeli hard-liners to crush Hamas, it remains unclear how far Israel will go in an operation that has already seen 299 Palestinians killed in 11 days of intense Israeli bombardment of the densely populated coastal strip, a fifth of them children.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had ordered the military to prepare for a "significant expansion" of the ground offensive.

photo

AP

Vapor trails from multiple Hamas rockets linger in the sky over northern Gaza on Friday.

"It is not possible to deal with tunnels only from the air. It needs to be done also from the ground," he said at a special Cabinet meeting in Tel Aviv. "We chose to begin this operation after the other options were exhausted and with the understanding that without the operation, the price we will pay can be very high."

Netanyahu said he had talked to world leaders to create "the international space, something that should not be taken for granted, so we can act systematically and with power against a murderous terror organization and its partners."

President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, whose meetings in Cairo on Wednesday and Thursday failed to produce a cease-fire agreement, said the ground operation would "lead to more bloodshed and complicate efforts to end the aggression," according to WAFA, the official Palestinian news agency. Abbas was to travel to Turkey and perhaps Qatar later Friday to continue cease-fire discussions.

Frustrated by Hamas' refusal to accept an Egyptian-brokered truce agreement and the failure of a 10-day campaign of more than 2,000 airstrikes to halt relentless rocket fire on Israeli cities, Israel launched a ground offensive it had previously been reticent to undertake to further weaken Hamas militarily.

"It won't end that quickly," said Yitzhak Aharonovitch, Israel's minister of public security. "Anything can happen. If we need to keep going, we will keep going. We won't stop. We need quiet for the citizens of the south and the citizens of Israel."

Khaled Meshal, the political leader of Hamas, the Islamist movement that dominates Gaza and has led the battle against Israel that began July 8, told Agence France-Presse from his base in Qatar on Friday that the ground operation was "bound to fail."

"What the occupier Israel failed to achieve through its air and sea raids, it will not be able to achieve with a ground offensive," Meshal said.

Civilian Toll Climbs

The Israeli military said it had killed nearly 20 militants in exchanges of fire since the ground offensive started Thursday night.

Gaza health officials said more than 50 Palestinians have been killed since then, including three young siblings from the Abu Musallam family who were killed when a tank shell hit their home.

At the morgue, 11-year-old Ahmed's face was blackened by soot, and he and his 14-year-old sister, Walaa, and 16-year-old brother, Mohammed, were wrapped in white burial shrouds. Their father, Ismail, said the three were sleeping when the shell struck, and he had to dig them out from under the rubble.

Israel said it was going to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties and blamed them on Hamas, accusing it of firing from within residential neighborhoods and using its civilians as "human shields." On Thursday, the United Nations refugee agency for Palestinians said a routine check in one of its vacant Gaza schools found about 20 hidden rockets and called on militants to respect the "sanctity and integrity" of U.N. property.

Critics say it is the intense fire itself in such a densely populated area that leads to the deaths of innocent civilians. The U.N. children's agency said at least 59 -- or one in five -- of the Palestinians killed were children under the age of 18. The refugee agency said 40,000 Palestinians were seeking refuge in 34 of its shelters throughout the Gaza Strip.

In a fresh effort to broker a truce, U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon was to leave today for the Middle East to help mediate the Gaza conflict, U.N. officials said. A cease-fire is "indispensable" for urgently needed humanitarian efforts to succeed, the undersecretary-general for political affairs Jeffrey Feltman said during an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council.

The Security Council scheduled an emergency session on Gaza for Friday afternoon in New York, at the request of Jordan. Turkey had also called for such a session, and its prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, on Friday accused Israel of "committing genocide" and said it "has tyrannized and continues to tyrannize."

"Israel threatens world peace. Israel threatens peace in the Middle East. Therefore, I, personally, can never contemplate anything positive with Israel as long as I remain on duty," Erdogan said after Muslim prayers.

In Turkey's capital of Ankara, hundreds of protesters pelted the top Israeli diplomat's residence with stones, and the private Dogan news agency said police in Istanbul used tear gas and water cannons to disperse protesters trying to enter the Israeli Consulate grounds.

Israel had earlier ordered the families of its diplomats and some staff members to leave Turkey after the protests.

Most countries have expressed support for Israel's right to defend itself, while urging it to minimize civilian deaths in its ground assault. President Barack Obama spoke with Netanyahu Friday and expressed his concern "about the risks of further escalation and the loss of more innocent life."

"No nation should accept rockets being fired into its borders or terrorists tunneling into its territory," Obama said after speaking with Netanyahu, noting that a siren signaling incoming rockets over Tel Aviv sounded during the phone conversation.

Netanyahu's office said in a statement that the prime minister had told the president after the siren sounded that it was "the reality in which millions of Israeli citizens have been living during the past number of days."

Obama also said he told Netanyahu that Secretary of State John Kerry is prepared to travel to the region.

Israel Targets Tunnels

The Israeli ground operation also brought Israel its first military casualty. The circumstances behind the death of Staff Sgt. Eitan Barak, 20, were not made clear: Hamas' military wing said it ambushed Israeli units in the northern town of Beit Lahiya.

A military spokesman said Barak was likely killed by friendly fire from a tank, but it was not confirmed yet. The army said a number of soldiers were also wounded. Earlier in the week, an Israeli civilian died from Palestinian mortar fire and several others have been wounded.

"The ground offensive does not scare us and we pledge to drown the occupation army in Gaza mud," Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said in a statement.

Israeli public opinion strongly supports the offensive after days of unrelenting rocket fire from Gaza and years of southern Israeli residents living under the threat. Gaza militants have fired more than 1,500 rockets at Israel over the past 11 days, and rocket fire continued across Israel Friday.

The order to launch the ground operation was triggered not by the rocket fire, but by a Hamas attempt to infiltrate Israel on Thursday, when 13 armed militants sneaked through a tunnel from Gaza and were killed by an airstrike as they emerged inside Israel.

The military, which has already mobilized more than 50,000 reservists, said paratroopers had uncovered eight tunnel access points across the Gaza Strip and engaged in several gunbattles with Hamas militants who ambushed them.

Israeli forces are expected to spend a day or two staking ground within 2 miles of the border in the north, east and south of the Gaza Strip. Then, they are expected to begin destroying tunnels, an operation that could take up to two weeks. Tanks, infantry and engineering forces were operating inside Gaza, where the military said it targeted rocket launchers, tunnels and more than 100 other sites.

Hamas has survived Israeli offensives in the past, including a major three-week ground operation in January 2009 and another week-long air offensive in 2012. Hamas now controls an arsenal of thousands of rockets, some long-range and powerful, and it has built a system of underground bunkers.

Information for this article was contributed by Ibrahim Barzak, Aron Heller, Ian Deitch, Tia Goldenberg, Yousur Alhlou, Karin Laub, Edith M. Lederer, Nedra Pickler, Suzan Fraser, and Matthew Lee of The Associated Press and by Jodi Rudoren, Fares Akram, Irit Pazner Garshowitz, Isabel Kershner, Anne Barnard, Tyler Hicks and Sebnem Arsu of The New York Times.

A Section on 07/19/2014