MIDDLE EAST: As Israel prepares a major incursion into Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinians appeal to the international community, David Horovitz reports
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is on the brink of still greater escalation, with Israel set to send troops deep into Palestinian areas of Gaza and the West Bank in an effort to prevent Hamas rocket fire at Israeli population centres.
Israeli planes fired missiles at Gaza City yesterday - the third attack in 24 hours - targeting a prison and a security compound. Palestinian officials said 30 people were injured in the raid, most of them lightly. Buildings were set ablaze and eyewitnesses said schoolchildren in the area ran screaming for cover.
Palestinian Authority officials called on the US and the rest of the international community to intervene. Mr Terje Roed-Larsen, the Gaza-based UN envoy whose office was damaged in air raids on Sunday, called the Israeli strikes "utterly unacceptable".
Palestinian officials said they had evacuated prisoners from the compound to another jail after the missile strike. But several prisoners, Islamic militants among them, were reported to have escaped - both from the jail attacked yesterday, and from the Palestinian Authority's jail in the West Bank city of Hebron where hundreds of residents forced their release.
The Israeli air raids came in response to Sunday's killing by Hamas gunmen of two female Israeli soldiers outside an army base in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba and to the firing, also on Sunday, of two Kassam rockets into southern Israel from Palestinian territory. The rockets used have a range of at least four miles.
Hardliners in the government were complaining yesterday that the army had not been ordered to invade Palestinian-held territory in an immediate response to the first use of the Kassam rockets. They are believed to be manufactured by Hamas activists in Gaza.
"Apparently we won't go in until we are hurt much more than we've already been hurt," fumed the Minister for Internal Security, Mr Uzi Landau.
The Israeli Defence Minister, Mr Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, said that Israel would use "intelligence and prevention" to try and counter the threat, "struggling against those places where you suspect and discover that there are factories or workshops for manufacturing those rockets."
But with Hamas now warning that, "all settlements and many cities will come under Kassam fire", Israeli analysts believe a large-scale military move into Palestinian territory is imminent.
"To keep rockets like the Kassam out of range, you must have a security space, and in order to do this, you must capture territory in a massive entry into (Palestinian-held) Area A," Gen Ze'ev Schiff, Israel's leading military analyst, wrote in Ha'aretz daily.
"In the end, the military conflict will have to reach a stage of diplomatic arrangements," he added. "But until that stage. it's very possible that the two peoples are heading for a horrible shedding of blood."