©AFP A relative inspects the house of Amer Abu Eishe, a Palestinian member of the Islamist Hamas in Hebron named by Israel as one of the two prime suspects in the murder of three kidnapped Israeli teenagers
Israeli aircraft carried out more than 30 strikes on a military compound of the Islamist group Hamas in the southern Gaza Strip early on Tuesday, the army said, as the government weighed a broader response to the killings of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank.
The bodies of the teenagers were found on Monday under a pile of rocks in a field northwest of Hebron, after more than two weeks of intensive searches. The youths had been gone missing on June 12 while hitchhiking home from religious schools they attended in the West Bank.
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There has been no claim of responsibility for the killings, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has blamed Hamas, warning that it “will pay”. Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence agency has named two suspects who are still at large, saying they are Hamas operatives from the southern West Bank city of Hebron.
The army said the air strike on a Hamas compound in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip was a response to the firing of more than 18 rockets at Israel by militants in the coastal territory since Sunday.
An army statement said 34 targets were hit in a “precision strike”, thought to be the most intense air attack in Gaza since an eight-day bombardment campaign against Hamas in 2012.
Lt Col Peter Lerner, a military spokesman, said the objectives included offices, command facilities and ammunition stockpiles. “We don’t want to escalate, but Hamas has to step up and stop the rocket fire from Gaza,” he said.
There have been daily exchanges of rocket fire and Israeli air strikes in Gaza in the past two weeks in tandem with the rising tensions in the West Bank triggered by the abduction and killing of the three youths.
Israeli forces carried out extensive sweeps in the West Bank after the teenagers disappeared, arresting more than 400 Palestinians, more than half of them suspected of being Hamas operatives.
Five Palestinians were shot and killed by troops in street clashes triggered by the raids, which also targeted charities, social welfare institutions, media offices and student groups suspected of links to Hamas. Another Palestinian was killed on Monday night in a raid on the West Bank.
Israel’s security cabinet ended an urgent meeting on Tuesday with no decisions announced, reflecting disagreement among senior ministers over how harshly to respond.
Some hawkish cabinet members advocated tough punitive measures, while others, including Moshe Yaalon, the defence minister, counselled restraint to avoid escalation, according to leaked accounts of the discussion. The forum was scheduled to convene again on Tuesday evening, after the funerals of the teenagers, identified as Eyal Yifrah, 19, Naftali Fraenkel, 16 and Gil-Ad Shaer, 16.
With public outrage over the killing and pressure to hit back hard from hawkish members of his cabinet, Mr Netanyahu is trying to craft a response that will appear firm without dragging Israel into a costlier and wider conflict, commentators said.
In a radio interview on Tuesday, Zeev Elkin, a senior member of Netanyahu’s Likud party and chairman of parliament’s foreign affairs and defence committee, called for the death penalty for the kidnappers, demolition of their families’ homes and expansion of Jewish settlement construction in the West Bank.
Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman in Gaza, warned Israel against launching a broad offensive in the territory, where militants are thought to have stockpiles of rockets that can reach deep into Israel.
“Netanyahu should know that threats don’t scare Hamas, and if he wages war on Gaza, the gates of hell will open on him,” he said.
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