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Monday, 14 July 2014 00:33 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
Despite intensified Israeli military action – which included a commando raid overnight in what was Israel’s first reported ground action in Gaza during the current fighting – militants continued to launch rocket after rocket across the border.
A long-range salvo on Sunday morning triggered air raid sirens at Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion international airport, which has not been hit in the hostilities and where flights have been operating normally, and some city suburbs.
On Saturday night, Hamas – the Islamist movement that rules Gaza – made good on a threat to send rockets streaking toward Tel Aviv at 9 p.m. and other areas in heavily populated central Israel.
Hundreds of thousands of Israelis sought shelter as Palestinians in the streets of Gaza City cheered the launchings, the biggest strike yet on the Tel Aviv metropolitan area.
Those rockets and the ones unleashed on Sunday were intercepted by the Israeli-built, and partly US-funded, Iron Dome missile defence system that has proved effective against Hamas’s most powerful weaponry.
No one has been killed by the more than 800 rockets the Israeli military said has been fired since the offensive began, and during Saturday night’s barrage, customers in Tel Aviv beachfront cafes shouted their approval as they watched the projectiles being shot out of the sky.
The Gaza Health Ministry said at least 160 Palestinians, including about 135 civilians – among them some 30 children – have been killed six days of warfare, and more than 1,000 have been wounded.
Israeli leaflets dropped on Beit Lahiya, where 70,000 Palestinians live, said civilians in three of its 10 neighbourhoods were “requested to evacuate their residences” and move south, deeper into the Gaza Strip, by 12 p.m.
The Gaza Interior Ministry, in a statement on Hamas radio, dismissed the Israeli warnings as “psychological warfare” and instructed those who left their homes to return and others to stay put.
The warnings cited roads that residents could use safely and said Israeli forces intended to attack “every area from where rockets are being launched”. The military did not say in the leaflet whether the strike would include ground troops.
It was the first time Israel had warned Palestinians to vacate dwellings in such a wide area. Previous warnings, by telephone or so-called “knock-on-the-door” missiles without explosive warheads, had been directed at individual homes slated for attack.
At least 4,000 people fled Beit Lahiya and crowded into eight UN-run schools in Gaza City on Sunday, a spokesman for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency said.
Israel says a ground invasion of Gaza remains an option, and it has already mobilised more than 30,000 reservists to do so, but most attacks have so far been from the air, hitting some 1,200 targets in the territory.
International pressure on both sides for a return to calm has increased, with the UN Security Council calling for a cessation of hostilities and Western foreign ministers due to meet on Sunday to weigh strategy.
Hostilities along the Israel-Gaza frontier first intensified last month after Israeli forces arrested hundreds of Hamas activists in the Israeli-occupied West Bank following the abduction there of three Jewish teenagers who were later found killed. A Palestinian youth was then killed in Jerusalem in a suspected Israeli revenge attack.
