By William Booth and Ruth Eglash,
GAZA CITY — Israel’s major military operation against Hamas and other militant groups in the Gaza Strip entered its third day Thursday, with a surge in deaths in the territory, including nine Palestinians killed while watching a World Cup game at a beach-front cafe.
The death toll in Gaza jumped overnight, doubling to 80 dead and more than 500 injured, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. One of the latest fatalities was 5-year-old Abdullah Abu Gazal, who was killed in a midmorning Israeli airstrike in Beit Lahia.
Israel pounded the coastal enclave with airstrikes Thursday aimed at Palestinian operatives, launch sites and weapons caches, as well as, more controversially, the homes of militant leaders there.
For its part, Hamas and other militant factions continued firing rockets indiscriminately at Israeli population centers. Sirens sounded in towns and cities across southern and central Israel on Thursday as dozens of rockets hit. No deaths or injuries were reported.
Nine Palestinians were killed in a strike by an Israeli F-16 while they were watching the World Cup semifinal match between Argentina and the Netherlands at a cafe.
At the Fun Time Beach café, a bulldozer sifted through debris Thursday morning searching for the remains of a missing 10th person.
Hundreds of chanting mourners waving Fatah party banners attended a funeral and burial Thursday morning for two brothers, Mohammed and Ibrahim Qannan, 24 and 26, who were killed late Wednesday while at the beach watching the soccer match on television.
Mohammed al-Amoodi, a neighbor who gave the eulogy, said the two brothers were not fighters but fishermen.
During graveside prayers, Amoodi told the mourners that the brothers died as martyrs. “The real revenge is by the rifle, by the rocket, by our strength, for the sake of Allah,” he said.
When he shouted, “our resistance is hitting Haifa and beyond!” — a reference to the rocket fire from Gaza — the crowd responded, “thanks to God.”
Another casualty in the enclave was a driver for the Gaza-based Media 24 news organization, who was hit and killed while driving a vehicle with large “TV” markings on the hood.
Since the operation began, Israel has struck more than 780 sites in Gaza and carried out several targeted killings of militant operatives and commanders. The group Islamic Jihad said three of its members were killed Thursday morning while driving in the center of Gaza City.
According to Israel’s home front authority, nine Israelis have suffered light injuries, mostly while running for bomb shelters. Dozens have been treated for anxiety and shock.
In response to the mounting casualty toll in Gaza, the Egyptian government opened the Rafah land crossing between the strip and the Sinai Peninsula on Thursday to let ambulances leave. Some Gazans with Egyptian relatives and documents were also being allowed to leave the territory.
In Jerusalem, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convened his security cabinet to discuss the worsening situation, Israeli media reported.
Secretary of State John F. Kerry, in a news conference in Beijing after wrapping up talks with Chinese officials, said the United States supports “Israel’s right to defend itself” from rocket attacks. He called for de-escalation and condemned Hamas, which has ruled the Gaza Strip since 2007.
“The situation on the ground in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza is obviously not only tense, but it is very, very dangerous for Israelis and for Palestinians in the wake of the deaths of the Israeli and Palestinian youth,” Kerry said.
“No country can accept rocket fire aimed at civilians, and we support completely Israel’s right to defend itself against these vicious attacks, but de-escalation ultimately is in the interests of all parties, in the interests of the region, the interest of Israel and the Palestinians,” he said.
Kerry said he has contacted Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, as well as other leaders in the region, about the prospect of arranging a cease-fire. “But clearly that is complicated because residents of southern Israel are forced to live under this rocket fire [and] have been subjected to this conflict because of Hamas’s decision,” he said.
Kerry said Hamas, which the United States and Israel consider a terrorist group, has rejected all appeals to disavow violence and find a negotiated solution.
Nevertheless, he said, “we will do everything in our power . . . to bring an end to this violence.”
In New York, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon also called on both sides to agree to a cease-fire, warning an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council that escalated warfare could spill over into other parts of the Middle East.
“Any further spiral of violence could have alarming unforeseen consequences,” Ban said, according to the Associated Press. He criticized both sides, condemning the Palestinian militants’ rocket attacks on Israel but also saying, in an apparent reference to Israeli airstrikes, that “the excessive use of force and endangering of civilian lives are also intolerable.”
Ban told the council, “Once again, Palestinian civilians are caught between Hamas’s irresponsibility and Israel’s tough response.”
Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Ron Prosor, dramatized the threat facing Israelis by suddenly playing for the council the piercing 15-second siren that warns Israelis to run to bomb shelters to escape rocket attacks, AP reported. He charged that Hamas is “intentionally and indiscriminately” threatening 3.5 million Israelis.
The Palestinian envoy, Riyad Mansour, urged the council to “stop the bleeding” in Gaza. He rejected Israeli charges that militants were using Palestinian civilians as “human shields,” saying that Israel was making such claims even as it “knowingly and intentionally strikes at densely populated civilian areas.”
Israeli aircraft are targeting houses in the Gaza Strip as never before, firing precision-guided missiles into family living rooms.
Israeli defense officials say their mission is not only to stop Hamas and other militant groups in the Gaza Strip from firing ever-more-powerful rockets deeper into Israel, but also to weaken Hamas by killing its commanders.
But by targeting houses, Israel’s risk of inflicting collateral damage has soared.
Netanyahu said Wednesday Hamas was to blame, because it was “hiding behind civilians.”
Palestinian militants fired rockets that flew well beyond Tel Aviv, Israel’s commercial capital, landing in the country’s coastal high-tech corridor.
The major Mediterranean port city of Haifa, about 100 miles north of the Gaza border, ordered the opening of its public bomb shelters Wednesday after rockets hit seaside towns to the south at Zichron Yaakov, Caesarea and Hadera. It was the first time that rockets from Gaza had flown that far into Israel.
The Israeli military said a Hamas rocket that struck Hadera, about 70 miles north of the Gaza border, was of the M-302 class, similar to ones found aboard a freighter that Israel intercepted in the Red Sea in March. The ship was ferrying a load of Iranian-supplied arms to Gaza, the Israelis said.
The group Human Rights Watch on Wednesday declared that because the Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel are both indiscriminate and target civilian population centers, they amount to war crimes. The group also said, “Israeli attacks targeting homes may amount to prohibited collective punishment.”
Israeli F-16 fighter jets, Apache attack helicopters and armed drones have hit more than 500 targets in the Gaza Strip over the past two days.
Awad al-Nawasra was sleeping under a dusty orange tree during the long, hot afternoon Wednesday when, he said, “I heard the voice of the rocket and then I was floating.”
When he awoke, the front of his two-story house had been torn away by an Israeli airstrike. His 24-year-old son was dead alongside his wife. Buried in the rubble were his two grandsons, ages 4 and 2.
Nawasra said he had nothing to do with Hamas or militants. He said his son was a telephone technician.
Abbas, the Palestinian president, condemned the airstrikes on Gaza and compared the Israeli operation to a form of “genocide.”
“This war is not against Hamas or any faction, but against the Palestinian people,” Abbas said.
The Israelis say Hamas does not maintain traditional forces or military bases, but hides its weapons caches and launchpads among the populace while its commanders live at home with their families. The Israelis have killed at least five known militants from the groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
“We use everything at hand to try to avoid and avert civilian casualties,” said an Israeli military spokesman, Lt. Col. Peter Lerner. “We phone up our enemies and tell them that we are going to blow up the building, we throw non-explosive munitions, and that is a sign they are supposed to vacate the building. Only once we have seen them vacate the building — and we are talking about command-and-control places and not the terrorists themselves — then we hit.”
At least 300 people, more than half of them women and children, were injured seriously enough to be taken to area hospitals in the past two days, said Gaza Health Ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qidra.
On Wednesday morning, two Israeli missiles struck the side yard of the home of Zaher Hamdan, who was found an hour later slumped against a neighbor’s wall in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun, sobbing and cursing the Israelis.
“The Israelis feed off blood,” he said. “If they want to knock down my house, knock it down! But they kill. They love killing.”
Hamdan said he had nothing to do with Hamas or other militant groups. He said there were no phone calls or warning rockets before the strike.
Hamdan’s sister-in-law, Sahar al-Masri, 40, and her 14-year-old son, Ibrahim, were sitting beneath a shade tree in the garden when two rockets struck. The second one killed them both.
Two of Masri’s daughters were wounded. One of the daughters, a toddler, was vomiting and crying in the back of an ambulance at nearby Beit Hanoun Hospital, her right leg and chest pocked by shrapnel wounds.
A surgeon at the hospital, Ayman Hamdan, said the young girl’s mother and brother died of massive bleeding. “They were dead when they arrived,” the physician said. “The rockets are designed to kill. They are very powerful, very lethal.”
The surgeon said his small hospital had treated nine patients seriously injured by Israeli airstrikes in the past two days. Eight other patients either died in surgery or arrived dead in the ambulance.
“We are not seeing wounded or dead fighters,” he said. “Most of these people look to me like civilians.”
Eglash reported from Tel Aviv. William Branigin in Washington, Simon Denyer in Beijing and Daniela Deane in Rome contributed to this report.
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