Starting the fifth day of Israel's largest offensive in Gaza in four years of conflict, army commanders were talking of a weeks-long operation, while officials looked even further ahead -- to Israel's planned evacuation of settlements from Gaza next year.
Early yesterday, despite the massive operation meant to prevent rocket attacks on Israeli towns, militants in Gaza fired off two rockets at the Israeli town of Sderot. One person was lightly wounded in the attack, Israeli rescue workers said.
PHOTO: AP
The Hamas militant group claimed responsibility for the rocket attack.
In the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahiya, Israeli troops killed four Palestinian militants as they tried to set off a bomb, the army said. The four were killed in a helicopter missile strike, the army said.
Palestinians identified the four as Hamas militants, one of them a field commander in northern Gaza, Fares Masri, 29, the brother of Hamas spokesman Musher Masri, who came to the hospital to identify the body.
A few hours earlier, Israeli forces targeted a local Hamas commander and another militant in a Gaza City air strike, the army said. The commander was seriously wounded in the attack. A second militant and a bystander were also wounded, hospital officials said.
The large-scale operation in northern Gaza gathered momentum again late Sunday when about 25 tanks moved into Beit Hanoun, the town closest to the Israeli border and the town of Sderot across the fence.
About 15,000 people living in the area of the raid have been without water and electricity for days.
A rocket attack on the town Wednesday killed two tots and set off the operation. Since Thursday, at least 62 Palestinians and three Israelis have been killed. Eight Palestinians, including a 13-year-old boy, were killed Sunday.
Israeli forces have cleared a 9km buffer zone in Gaza to move its towns out of range of the rockets, but militants keep trying. An Israeli helicopter fired a missile at militants, killing two, just after they shot off a rocket.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon pledged to expand the area under Israeli control to stop the rocket fire.
"The forces will have to remain there as long as this danger exists," Sharon told Army Radio, and Lieutenant General Moshe Yaalon, the army commander, said, "The troops are ready to continue, not in terms of days, but weeks."
Israeli officials fear that the continuing rocket fire might undermine the already shaky support for Sharon's Gaza pullout plan. Critics warn that after an Israeli exit, the rocket attacks would only escalate.
Many of the critics are from Sharon's own Likud Party, which has voted against the plan twice in different frameworks. Sharon and Likud have for decades been the main forces behind settlement construction and expansion, and Sharon's party members have not taken kindly to his change of heart.
Presenting his plan to evacuate all 21 Gaza settlements and four small ones from the West Bank, Sharon said the presence of 8,000 Jewish settlers among 1.3 million Palestinians had become untenable.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
CONFIDENT ON DEAL: ‘Ukraine wants a seat at the table, but wouldn’t the people of Ukraine have a say? It’s been a long time since an election, the US president said US President Donald Trump on Tuesday criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and added that he was more confident of a deal to end the war after US-Russia talks. Trump increased pressure on Zelenskiy to hold elections and chided him for complaining about being frozen out of talks in Saudi Arabia. The US president also suggested that he could meet Russian President Vladimir Putin before the end of the month as Washington overhauls its stance toward Russia. “I’m very disappointed, I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida when asked about the Ukrainian
RSS