JERUSALEM — Palestinian militants fired rockets for the first time at Jerusalem on Friday in a daring new escalation of hostilities with Israel on the third day of their latest lethal conflict over the Gaza Strip. The attack triggered air-raid sirens and panicked residents who had thought themselves secure from such attacks because of the holy city’s multireligious heritage and large Palestinian population.
Israeli authorities did not immediately confirm the origin of the rocket fire, but it was assumed that the source was Gaza, where the Palestinian militant group Hamas and its radical affiliates have amassed arsenals of smuggled rockets with increased ranges and more accurate trajectories in recent years.
On Thursday, they launched at least two at Tel Aviv, Israel’s biggest city, for the first time, and Friday they launched more as part of a response to a large-scale aerial assault by the Israelis on targets in Gaza and indications that Israel was close to initiating its first ground invasion there in four years.
“We are sending a short and simple message: There is no security for any Zionist or any single inch of Palestine and we plan more surprises,” said Abu Obeida, a spokesman for the military wing of Hamas, in a message quoted by The Associated Press.
Jerusalem, a city holy to Jews, Muslims and Christians, had been previously thought off-limits to rocket attacks by militant Palestinians and others who reject Israel’s claim to the city as its capital. Even Saddam Hussein, the then-Iraqi leader, had avoided targeting the city when he aimed Scud missiles at Israel during the Persian Gulf War in 1991. The city is about 48 miles from the Gaza border.
The police in Jerusalem said no rockets fell within city limits, but one crashed harmlessly near a Jewish West Bank settlement just south of Jerusalem. A police spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld, said other explosions were heard in the same area but security forces had not located the impact sites.
The Jerusalem rocket attack came hours after scores of rockets were fired from Gaza into Israel, striking major cities of the south, causing widespread panic and damage and shattering plans for a temporary cease-fire during a visit to Gaza by the Egyptian prime minister that showed the shifting dynamics of Middle East politics since the turmoil of the Arab Spring uprisings.
Israeli officials say the only rockets in Gaza with a range that can reach Tel Aviv, about 53 miles away, are the Iranianmade Fajr-5 projectiles that Israel has been targeting in its hundreds of airstrikes over the past few days.
The fact that these rockets were still being fired seemed to weigh heavily in Israeli military calculations about a ground invasion. After a meeting with President Shimon Peres, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the Israeli army was “continuing to hit Hamas hard and is ready to expand the operation into Gaza,” according to a statement from his office.
Netanyahu said that the aim was “to take out the terrorist infrastructure in Gaza while doing everything possible not to harm civilians.” He added that “Israel must continue to hit hard the missiles which are intended for central and southern Israel.”
The rapidly escalating confrontation between Hamas and Israel followed an Israeli airstrike Wednesday that killed the top military commander of Hamas, and the tit-for-tat violence is widely seen as a potential catalyst for broader hostilities at a time of spreading turmoil in Syria and elsewhere in the region.
Early Friday, the Israeli military said it had called up16,000 army reservists after Defense Minister Ehud Barak authorized the call-up of 30,000 reservists, if needed, to move against what Israel considers an unacceptable security threat from smuggled rockets amassed by Hamas, which does not recognize Israel’s right to exist.
It was not initially clear whether the show of Israeli force on the ground was meant as more of an intimidation tactic to further pressure Hamas leaders, who had all been forced into hiding Wednesday after the group’s military chief, Ahmed Jabari, was killed by a pinpoint missile strike on his car. But Israel’s preparations seemed to pick up Friday after the attempts to land rockets in Tel Aviv added new urgency while Hamas itself seemed emboldened by Egypt’s support.
“The time in which the Israeli occupation does whatever it wants in Gaza is gone,” said Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas prime minister.
Initially, the Egyptian initiative was portrayed as a potential harbinger of reduced hostilities, and, as Prime Minister Hesham Kandil of Egypt prepared to travel to Gaza, Israel agreed to a temporary conditional cease-fire for thevisit. But the truce never took root.
Israel Radio said Palestinian militants had fired 25 rockets into southern Israel, one of them striking a house. There were no immediate reports of casualties.
What sounded like airstrikes by Israeli F-16s were also audible in Gaza City. The Israeli military said no such strikes had taken place, but the Hamas Health Ministry reported that two people, including a child, were killed in the north of Gaza City while the Egyptian delegation was on the ground.
The Palestinian death toll rose to 28 on Friday. The number included a man apparently executed by Hamas for what it said was collaboration with Israel in the deaths of 15 Palestinian leaders. Later in the day, witnesses in Gaza said an Israeli rocket hit the home of a local Hamas leader at the al-Maghazi refugee camp in the middle of Gaza, killing him and two relatives, and the Health Ministry said a 22-year-old girl died from wounds suffered in an earlier Israeli airstrike.
Three Israelis have been killed in the violence.
The Egyptian prime minister’s visit produced dramatic imagery to underpinhis government’s support for Hamas, which Israel, the United States and much of the West consider to be a terrorist organization.
Kandil and Haniyeh visited the Al Shifa hospital amid a huge scrum of bodyguards and journalists, saying they had carried the body of Mohammed Yasser, one of eight children whom Palestinian health officials say have been killed in the surge of violence.
“This is the blood of our children on our clothes,” Haniyeh said as he showed spatters on his clothing, “These are the Egyptian and the Palestinian blood united together.”
Like President Mohammed Morsi of Egypt on Thursday, Kandil walked a delicate line between support for Hamas, condemnation of Israel and a quest for calm in a region increasingly threatened by the spillovers from Syria’s civilwar, as well as by the long-festering impasse between the Israelis and Palestinians.
“The aim of this visit is not only to show political support but to support the Palestinian people on the ground,” Kandil said, noting that he had brought with him a delegation from the Egyptian Health Ministry. He said a cease-fire between Gaza and Israel was “the only way to achieve stability in the region” and also called on the Palestinians to repair the rift between Hamas in Gaza and the Fatah group that dominates the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.
“We call on the Palestinian people to unite because their power and strength is in their unity,” Kandil said.“That’s the only way to liberate Palestine.”
The visit was the first of such a high-ranking Egyptian official to this coastal enclave since the militant Hamas faction gained control in 2007, and the visit offered a potent sign of how Egypt’s revolution and new Islamist leadership since the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak last year has shifted the geopolitics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Egypt, Kandil said, will “save nothing to stop the aggression and achieve a continuous cease-fire on the way to having a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.”
Haniyeh said: “Egypt cannot accept the aggression as before. I welcome Egypt for this historical visit that comes in harmony with the will of the free Egypt.”
Morsi, Egypt’s Islamist president, delivered hisfiercest condemnation yet of Israel’s offensive in Gaza on Friday, warning that the blood Israel sheds will be a “curse upon it” and presenting post-revolution Egypt as the new Arab champion for the Palestinians. He spoke in a speech at a mosque after weekly Friday prayers.
After Friday prayers, thousands marched in Cairo in support of Palestinians.
Information for this article was contributed by Fares Akram, Rick Gladstone, Rina Castelnuovo, Mayy El Sheikh, David D. Kirkpatrick and Gabby Sobelman of The New York Times and by Ibrahim Barzak, Josef Federman, Aya Batrawy and Ian Deitch of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 11/17/2012