Palestinian mourners attend the noon prayers before the funeral of three senior commanders of the Hamas military wing, who were killed in early morning Israeli strikes, in the Rafah refugee camp, southern Gaza Strip, yesterday.
Reuters/Gaza/Jerusalem
Israel killed three senior Hamas commanders in the Gaza Strip in an air strike yesterday and said it would continue to target the group’s armed leadership after a ceasefire failed.
Hamas, which dominates Gaza, named the men as Mohamed Abu Shammala, Raed al-Attar and Mohamed Barhoum, the three highest-ranking casualties it has announced since Israel started its offensive six weeks ago.
All three, killed in the bombing of a house in the southern Gaza town of Rafah, had led operations against Israel over the past 20 years, Hamas said. Hospital officials said a four-year-old girl injured in the attack later died of her wounds.
The Israeli military and Shin Bet, the internal security service, confirmed it had targeted two of the men.
Since the collapse on Tuesday of a 10-day ceasefire, the Israeli military has ramped up its efforts to hit the leadership of Hamas’s armed wing, the Izz el-Deen al-Qassam Brigades.
“We will continue to seek out and target Hamas leaders anywhere, and everywhere - wherever they are,” Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon said. Hamas said in a statement “the assassination policy has failed to weaken (our) resistance”.
Late on Tuesday, the Israeli air force bombed a house in northern Gaza, an attempt, Hamas said, to assassinate Mohamed Deif, its top military commander. Deif’s wife, daughter and seven-month-old son were killed but Deif escaped, Hamas said.
At a news conference on Wednesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declined to say whether Israel had tried to kill Deif, but said militant leaders were legitimate targets and that “none are immune” from attack.
Tens of thousands of Palestinians marched at the funeral of the three Hamas commanders yesterday, firing weapons into the air in anger and calling for revenge.
“The assassinations of the three Qassam leaders is a grave crime,” Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said. “But it will not break our people and Israel will pay the price for it.”
Palestinian health officials said 29 Palestinians, including four children, the Hamas commanders and at least two other militants, were killed in Israeli air strikes yesterday.
The Israeli military said aircraft attacked more than 30 sites across Gaza and that militants fired more than 70 rockets and mortar bombs into Israel. A mortar bomb that landed near a kindergarten in an Israeli kibbutz badly wounding a parent of one of the children, according to the Israeli ambulance service.
Amos Yadlin, former chief of Israel’s military intelligence and head of Tel Aviv University’s INSS think-tank, said Israel, which was engaged in indirect ceasefire talks with Hamas in Cairo until Tuesday, had now changed its game plan.
“The prime minister has adopted a strategy which says, ‘You shoot at us, we’ll hit you seven times harder, you want attrition? We have intelligence and an air force that will crush you with greater force’,” he told Israel Radio.
However, Israel’s ultimate goal could still be a diplomatic deal to end the hostilities, Yadlin said.
Israel launched its offensive in Gaza on July 8. Gaza health officials say 2,061 Palestinians, most of them civilians, have been killed.
Israeli attacks have devastated many areas in the densely-populated enclave, home to 1.8mn people, with 425,000 of people displaced, according to the UN.
Sixty-four Israeli soldiers have been killed in the conflict, as well as three civilians in Israel.
Egypt has said it will continue contacts with both sides, whose delegates left Cairo after hostilities resumed. Yet there appears to be little chance in the current circumstances of putting an end to fighting or making progress on peace talks.
Netanyahu said fighting could go on for a long while and provisionally approved the call-up of 10,000 army reservists.
“This will be a continuous campaign,” he told reporters.
Hamas has said it will not relent until the Israeli-Egyptian blockade on the Gaza Strip is lifted. Both countries view Hamas as a security threat and are reluctant to make sweeping concessions without guarantees weapons will not enter Gaza.
The commanders targeted yesterday were the most senior Hamas men killed since November 2012, when the assassination of military chief Ahmed al-Jaabari triggered an eight-day cross-border war. While Israel says it has killed several hundred Hamas militants in the conflict, they have largely been front-line fighters, not the organisation’s commanders.
