Israel: 2009 Archives

That Mark Steyn is brilliant, we know.

Putting the pieces together as he does in his words about the pathology of Jew hatred is brilliant. Hatred corrupts the haters and nowhere is that shown more clearly than by the Palestinians and their Muslim brethren worldwide.

Through the centuries it is estimated that in its expansionary wars Islam has killed 270 million people, including 80 million Hindus. Jews have always been at the top of the list to be killed, following Mohammad's example.

With 1.2 billion Muslims now in the world it must be frustrating to true believer Muslims that they are somehow dominated by 14 million Jews whom they cannot exterminate.

The ‘Oldest Hatred’

It didn’t get that way without an ability to adapt.

By Mark Steyn
National Review Online
January 10, 2009

In Toronto, anti-Israel demonstrators yell “You are the brothers of pigs!”, and a protester complains to his interviewer that “Hitler didn’t do a good job.”

In Fort Lauderdale, Palestinian supporters sneer at Jews, “You need a big oven, that’s what you need!”

In Amsterdam, the crowd shouts, “Hamas, Hamas! Jews to the gas!”

In Paris, the state-owned TV network France-2 broadcasts film of dozens of dead Palestinians killed in an Israeli air raid on New Year’s Day. The channel subsequently admits that, in fact, the footage is not from January 1st 2009 but from 2005, and, while the corpses are certainly Palestinian, they were killed when a truck loaded with Hamas explosives detonated prematurely while leaving the Jabaliya refugee camp in another of those unfortunate work-related accidents to which Gaza is sadly prone. Conceding that the Palestinians supposedly killed by Israel were, alas, killed by Hamas, France-2 says the footage was broadcast “accidentally.”

In Toulouse, a synagogue is firebombed; in Bordeaux, two kosher butchers are attacked; at the Auber RER train station, a Jewish man is savagely assaulted by 20 youths taunting, “Palestine will kill the Jews;” in Villiers-le-Bel, a Jewish schoolgirl is brutally beaten by a gang jeering, “Jews must die.”

In Helsingborg, the congregation at a Swedish synagogue takes shelter as a window is broken and burning cloths thrown in; in Odense, principal Olav Nielsen announces that he will no longer admit Jewish children to the local school after a Dane of Lebanese extraction goes to the shopping mall and shoots two men working at the Dead Sea Products store; in Brussels, a Molotov cocktail is hurled at a Belgian synagogue; in Antwerp, lit rags are pushed through the mail flap of a Jewish home; and, across the Channel, “youths” attempt to burn the Brondesbury Park Synagogue.

In London, the police advise British Jews to review their security procedures because of potential revenge attacks. The Sun reports “fears” that “Islamic extremists” are drawing up a “hit list” of prominent Jews, including the Foreign Secretary, Amy Winehouse’s record producer, and the late Princess of Wales’s divorce lawyer. Meanwhile, The Guardian reports that Islamic non-extremists from the British Muslim Forum, the Islamic Foundation and other impeccably respectable “moderate” groups have warned the government that the Israelis’ “disproportionate force” in Gaza risks inflaming British Muslims, “reviving extremist groups,” and provoking “UK terrorist attacks” — not against Amy Winehouse’s record producer and other sinister members of the International Jewish Conspiracy but against targets of, ah, more general interest.

Forget, for the moment, Gaza. Forget that the Palestinian people are the most comprehensively wrecked people on the face of the earth. For the past sixty years they have been entrusted to the care of the United Nations, the Arab League, the PLO, Hamas and the “global community” — and the results are pretty much what you’d expect. You would have to be very hardhearted not to weep at the sight of dead Palestinian children, but you would also have to accord a measure of blame to the Hamas officials who choose to use grade schools as launch pads for Israeli-bound rockets, and to the UN refugee agency that turns a blind eye to it. And, even if you don’t deplore Fatah and Hamas for marinating their infants in a sick death cult in which martyrdom in the course of Jew-killing is the greatest goal to which a citizen can aspire, any fair-minded visitor to the West Bank or Gaza in the decade and a half in which the “Palestinian Authority” has exercised sovereign powers roughly equivalent to those of the nascent Irish Free State in 1922 would have to concede that the Palestinian “nationalist movement” has a profound shortage of nationalists interested in running a nation, or indeed capable of doing so. There is fault on both sides, of course, and Israel has few good long-term options. But, if this was a conventional ethno-nationalist dispute, it would have been over long ago.

Israel in perspective:

Ah, yes.

There are 7 million Israelis, 20% of whom are Arab-Israeli citizens, living in a half-desert area smaller than New Jersey, surrounded by some 350 million Arabs and 70 million or so Iranians, 65% of whom are Persians and the rest a mix of Arabs and others. Since before 1948, the birth of Israel, Arabs have been seeking to wipe out the Jews in what is now Israel. Of late, Iran has chipped in and is now playing a leading role financing and arming Hamas, which is dedicated to the annihlation of Israel and its Jews.

Regardless of the differences between the Arabs and Iran (and they are real, because the Arabs fear a nuclear Iran), they are united by the teaching of Mohammad and his Koran that Jews are to be destroyed (since contemporay Jews of Mohammad refused to recognize him as a Prophet, Mohammad had them killed). Other true believers(an unknown percentage) among the world's 1.2 billion Muslims share the same goal.

Israel is at the forefront of Islam's divine mission to conquer the world. Success there would move the battlefield to "lost" Muslim lands in India (already under attack), the Balkans, Philippines, Spain and Italy while the groundwork for conquest is laid elsewhere in the world, the rest of Europe and the U.S. holding top priority along with Brazil. (Europe has between 20 and 50 million non-assimilated Muslims living there already. Shockingly, Muslims claim 12 million in Brazil, which is more than twice the number in the U.S.)

It is imperative for the West that Israel's enemies are defeated.

Many were killed by the Islamic terrorists in Mumbai, but the savagery of the murders at the Orthodox Jewish center had even experienced pathologists refusing to talk about the condition of the bodies of the young American rabbi and his six-month pregnant wife.

The one Islamic terrorist captured by Indian forces has now disclosed that the Jewish center the Nariman House, not the Taj or the other hotel or the shopping mall, was the prime target on November 26.

Ajmal reportedly told the police they wanted to sent a message to Jews across the world by attacking the ultra orthodox synagogue.

Approximately half the Jews in the world live in Israel and almost an equal number live in the United States. So the fixation of the Iranian leadership, Hamas, Hezbollah and al Qaeda on killling Jews (based on the Koran and the actions of Mohammad) is shared by the Islamic terrorists of Pakistan. And millions of the Jews they seek to kill are Americans. No way. In Israel or America.

Nariman House, not Taj, was the prime target on 26/11

Somendra Sharma
January 5, 2009
DNAIndia

Think 26/11, and images of the carnage at the Taj come to mind. But the terrorists themselves were in no doubt that Nariman House was the prime focus. For this was the place which housed a Jewish centre, and the fanatics from Pakistan were clear that they wanted to send a message to the world from there.

The Mumbai crime branch, which is investigating the terror attacks, has found that the terrorists’ handlers in Pakistan were clear this operation should not fail under any circumstances. The rest of the operations — at the Taj, Oberoi and Chhattrapati Shivaji Terminus — were intended to amplify the effect.

A senior police official, told DNA on condition of anonymity, that the interrogation of Mohammed Amir Iman Ajmal (aka Kasab) revealed as much. Just before entering the city, the terrorists’ team leader, Ismail Khan, briefed them once again about their targets. “But Khan briefed Imran Babar, alias Abu Akasha, and Nasir, alias Abu Umer, intensely on what to do at Nariman House,” the officer said.

When asked during interrogation why Nariman House was specifically targetted, Ajmal reportedly told the police they wanted to sent a message to Jews across the world by attacking the ultra orthodox synagogue.

According to the statement by Ajmal, Khan told Babar and Nasir that even if the others failed in their operation, they both could not afford to. “The Nariman House operation has to be a success,” the officer said, quoting from Ajmal’s statement.

“Khan also said that as far as Nariman House was concerned, there should not be even a minimal glitch in finding it and capturing it,” the officer quoted Ajmal as saying.

After the dinghy carrying the 10 terrorists reached Mumbai at the Macchimar colony opposite Badhwar Park in Cuffe Parade, it was decided that no bombs would be planted in the taxi to be used to reach Nariman House.

“The idea,” according to the police officer, “was that if Babar and Nasir got delayed in locating and entering Nariman House, the bomb in the taxi may explode even before they entered their target.”

The officer further quoted Ajmal’s confession as indicating the Nariman House killers may have either lost their way or took their time entering the building to avoid failure.
The dinghy reached Cuffe Parade around 8.30pm, but Babar and Nasir entered
Nariman House at around 10pm. This means they took around one- and-a-half hour to locate and enter Nariman House,” the officer said. Anyone who knows Colaba would have got there in 15-20 minutes.

Another aspect which indicates that the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) did not want the Nariman House operation to fail was Fahim Ansari’s revelation to the crime branch. Ansari, who was arrested for his alleged involvement in the bomb blasts at a CRPF camp in Lucknow in January last year, told the police that Nariman House was also surveyed by him last year. Interestingly, Ansari did not reveal this detail when he was arrested by the Uttar Pradesh police in February last year.

“Ansari told us that he did not divulge this information earlier because it would have jeopardised the most important operation of the LeT. He had also been warned by the LeT that Nariman House was their most secret operation and must not be compromised at any cost,” the officer said.

Andrew McCarthy, the former federal prosecutor who sent the blind shiekh who masterminded the first World Trade Center bombing to jail, makes it clear what it will take for Palestinians ever to have their own state in a "two-state" Palestine.

What's more, McCarthy says it will take a least a generation for Palestinians to show they are worthy of their own state. All the talk about "peace" and a two-state solution presumably just over the horizon should just stop. It just makes the Palestinians believe their terrorism is working.

Palestinians are weaned on Jew-hatred through schools and media controlled by the competing factions and other jihadists. Their national heroes are those dedicated to killing Jews, most especially the “martyrs” (or shaheed) who self-implode in suicide attacks. It is to be expected, then, that when the public is polled in the actual Palestinian territories, rather than in Condi-world, a very different reality is reflected: About three in four Palestinians deny Israel’s right to exist, a figure that soars to over nine in ten when only the fighting-age demographic (between 18 and 25) is considered.

The hatred of Jews and Israel that fills the Palestinian airwaves is no different whether the broadcaster is Hamas or the Palestinian Authority controlled by Fatah.

Let’s be blunt: we are looking at a generation or more before the Palestinians might be prepared to assume the obligations of sovereignty. So we should stop talking about it. Doing so only indicates to the Palestinians that we are more interested in the simulacrum of a settlement than in cultivating a mature statehood that is stable, hopefully democratic, and respectful of its peers — such that it is capable of negotiating with them absent the notion of annihilating them. “Roadmaps” and “peace processes” which hold out the possibility (indeed, the likelihood) of near-term statehood tell the Palestinians that terrorism succeeds and that they can reap enormous benefits while continuing to work toward Israel’s demise.

In short, we can help Israel enormously in the here and now — while simultaneously setting the Palestinians on their only realistic path toward long-term prosperity — by making clear that statehood is absolutely off the table until the Palestinians convincingly abandon terrorism, acknowledge Israel’s right to exist, rescind or amend all covenants to the contrary, and demonstrably overhaul their institutions (especially their media and education systems) in a manner that conveys their commitment to this new state of affairs.

In the short run, the U.S. should support Israel in its effort to break Hamas' grip on Gaza and of the Palestinian people. Secretary of State Rice not too long ago claimed that 70% of Palestinians were ready to live in peace alongside Israel. McCarthy calls that statement "preposterous." Many polls show that, despite their suffering and poverty under Hamas, Gazans support their terrorist war on Israel.

If peace is ever to come, the Palestinians' will must be broken. They must know they are defeated and cannot destroy Israel, as both Hamas and Fatah are in their founding documents dedicated to do.

Read it all.

Melanie Phillips, the distinguished British author and journalist puts Israel's war with Hamas in the proper world war context:

The issue of Israel sits at the very apex of the fight to defend civilisation. Those who wish to destroy western civilisation need to destroy the Jews, whose moral precepts formed its foundation stones. The deranged hatred of the Jews lies at the core of the Islamists’ hatred of America, the ‘infidel’ west and modernity, and is the reason why they wish to destroy Israel. Unless people in the west understand that Israel’s fight is their own fight, they will be on the wrong side of the war to defend not just the west but civilisation in general.

The author, columnist and historian of ancient wars Victor Davis Hanson, distinguished senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, finds what's going on is "creepy."

It is now clear that the so-called and much praised "international community," the hallowed U.N., the revered EU, all pretty much are indifferent to the survival of a democratic Israel, or are actively supportive of its terrorist Hamas enemy. Only the U.S. (for now) stands by a constitutional state in its war against a murderous terrorist clique, with annhilation its aim and religous fascism its creed.

VDH's full comment:

Creepy Times

There is something especially nauseating about the latest Middle East war — scenes of worldwide Islamic protests with photos of Jews as apes, protesters (in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida of all places!) screaming about nuking Israel and putting Jews in ovens, parades of children dressed up with suicide vests and fake rockets, near constant anti-Semitic vicious sloganeering, Gaza mosques stuffed with rockets to be used against civilians — all to be collated with creepy Hamas rhetoric about the annihilation of Israel. This is the world in which we now live.

Almost no other issue in recent memory has illustrated the moral bankruptcy of much of the international community. Hamas has no pretensions, like the PA, of being a governing authority; it used violence to rout the PA and then bragged that its charter pledging the destruction of Israel remained unchanged. Israel evacuated Gaza; Gazans in response looted their own infrastructure, alienated both the PA and Egypt,and then sent off more than 6,000 rockets against Israeli civilians, while eagerly becoming a terrorist puppet of theocratic Iran.

Nothing could be more clear: either the fact that a constitutional republic was trying to avoid civilian casualties while a terrorist organization was intent on killing Jewish civilians as it used its own citizens as shields to protect mostly young male terrorists; or the world's craven reaction to all this.

Again all very creepy — the stuff of Tolkien's Mordor. It is now clear that the so-called and much praised "international community," the hallowed U.N., the revered EU, all pretty much are indifferent to the survival of a democratic Israel, or are actively supportive of its terrorist Hamas enemy. Only the U.S. (for now) stands by a constitutional state in its war against a murderous terrorist clique, with annhilation its aim and religous fascism its creed.

Mark Steyn muses about the importance of culture as articulated by Samuel Huntington in his landmark essay The Clash of Civilizations.

Inevitably, the principal clash discussed in the one between the Muslm world and everyone else. Former Muslim Syrian-born Wafa Sultan on Islamic television network al Jazeera said the clash was not between civilzations but between civilzation and barbarism.

Mark notes that in Gaza Hamas has just reinstituted crucifixion as a form of punishment. The Palestinians have a single-minded focus on killing Jews as a career, with some attention paid to dispatching Christians, as they recently did by attacking a group traveling to Bethlemen for Christmas observance.

In Gaza, they don’t vote for Hamas because they want access to university education. Or, if they do, it’s to get Junior into the Saudi-funded Hamas-run Islamic University of Gaza, where majoring in rocket science involves making one and firing it at the Zionist Entity.

And is poverty, as some argue, the cause of this?

Wafa Samir Ibrahim al-Biss, a young Palestinian woman who received considerate and exemplary treatment at an Israeli hospital in Beersheva, returned to that same hospital packed with explosives in order to blow herself up and kill the doctors and nurses who restored her to health.

Are we actually listening to the Hamas and Iranian spokemen spout their genocidal intentions towards Israel, Britain and America, Steyn asks. Channel 4 in Britain carried a "Chirstmas message" from Iran's president Ahmadinehad because it maintained people don't get a chance to hear from him.

So when Channel 4 says that we don’t get the chance to see these fellows speak for themselves, it would be more accurate to say that they speak for themselves incessantly but the louder they speak the more we put our hands over our ears and go “Nya nya, can’t hear you.” We do this in part because, if you’re as invested as most western elites are in the idea that all anyone wants is to go to university, get a steady job and settle down in a nice house in the suburbs, a statement such as “England’s demise is on our agenda” becomes almost literally untranslatable. When President Ahmadinejad threatens to wipe Israel off the face of the map, we deplore him as a genocidal fantasist. But maybe he’s a genocidal realist — look at the threads linking North Korea to Iran and to Iran’s clients in Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza — and we’re the fantasists.

So which way are things trending?

The civilizational clashes of Professor Huntington’s book are not inevitable. Culture is not immutable. But changing culture is tough and thankless and something the west no longer has the stomach for. Unfortunately, the Saudis do, and so do the Iranians. And not just in Gaza but elsewhere the trend is away from “moderation” and toward something fiercer and ever more implacable.

Clashing Civilizations

By Mark Steyn

So how was your holiday season? Over in Gaza, whether or not they’re putting the Christ back in Christmas, they’re certainly putting the crucifixion back in Easter. According to the London-based Arabic newspaper al Hayat, on December 23rd Hamas legislators voted to introduce Sharia — Islamic law — to the Palestinian Territories, including crucifixion. So next time you’re visiting what my childhood books still quaintly called “the Holy Land,” the re-enactments might be especially lifelike.

continue ...

So many in the West refuse to grasp the reality of Islamic hatred and violence, especially when Israel is involved. Europeans protest Israel's "disproportionate response" to thousands of rocket, missiles and mortar rounds fired from Gaza by Hamas and its allies into Israeli villages, towns and cities killing, maiming and terrorizing civiian men, women and children. President-Elect Obama, though, got it right.

"If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night," he said while visiting the border town of Sderot last summer, "I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that.

"And I would expect Israelis to do the right thing."

Hamas is a terrorist organization, declared as such for years by the U.S. Government. But Hamas has its supporters right here in the United States. Funds have been and are being raised for Hamas in the United States. The Islamic Holy Land Foundation and its principal officers were recently convicted of funneling "charitable" monies from its headquarters in Texas to Hamas.

Several expert observers of the influence Islam exerts on its subjects, particularly those "educated" in Muslim lands or Muslim enclaves such as exist throughout Western Europe, are now arguing that Muslim immigration into the United States should be halted before "it's too late." It is an alien culture. For Europe, with its 20-60 million (nobody knows exactly) Muslims, it may already be too late, though some there are belatedly speaking out against additional Muslim immigration. Those in England who warned of the dangers of mass Muslim immigration decades ago were pilloried.

Former Muslim Wafa Sultan, a psychiatrist who left Syria for California, disagrees with the characterization coined by Professor Sam Huntington of the war being waged by Islam as a clash of civilizations. It is the clash of civilization and barbarism, she says. .

To get a sense of some of the Muslims who are in our midst and the hatred that seethes from them, watch this 9-minute video of Palestinian and other Muslims (HT: Power Line) rallying to the Hamas' support -- in downtown Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. It could have been Boston, New York or San Francisco or any of the 40 cities that Hamas is reported to have chapters in.

Yesterday we asked if Israel would stop its war against Hamas short of victory. Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe asked a similar question, Has Israel learned its lesson?

Jacoby was hopeful Israel had learned its lesson, while we were pessimistic, expressing the opinion that Israel was in fact signalling it was going to repeat its mistakes in the Hezbollah war of 2006 that led to Hezbollah -- rightly -- claiming victory.

In Lebanon, the Israel Defense Forces performed brilliantly, but were held back by the inept political leaders of the government who agreed to a disastrous ceasefire.

The same scenario is being reenacted in Gaza, where the IDF has delivered punishing blows to Hamas and is poised on the border ready to launch a ground assault to defeat the enemy once and for all. But already Israel's leaders are buckling.

Now the Middle East's leading political analyst Caroline Glick weighs in with her view, which is that Israel is setting up to hand a victory to Hamas, making Israel even more unsafe that it was before the IDF campaign began. Israel is in fact going to stop short of victory.

The Olmert/Livni/Barak government is at best delivering a rap across the knuckles to Hamas and in return Hamas is getting the full support of the European Union in their demands for full control of their land and sea borders without making any meaningful concessions at all. Hamas will not be asked to stop smuggling arms, to renounce and halt terrorism and to recognize the right of Israel to exist. At most, Hamas will agree to a truce period, which it will use to dig more tunnels from Egypt to rearm itself with more weapons from Iran and more tunnels into Israel for suicide killers to sneak through. As has happened with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, Hamas' war machine will be rebuilt stronger than ever.

Unfortunately, the peace-at-any-price media in Israel is praising the half-way measures of the government as if something important is being achieved. As usual, peace is in sight, but somehow it never materializes.

Glick's assessment of what's needed:

In truth, given Hamas's commitment to Israel's destruction at all costs and its indifference to the lives of its Palestinian subjects, there is only one way for Israel to secure its territory from Hamas attack. It must destroy Hamas's ability to wage war. The only way Israel can achieve its aim is by conquering Gaza, overthrowing Hamas's regime and destroying its military forces.

But that will not happen.

Since the Olmert-Livni-Barak government has already stated that it will not launch such an attack, it is obvious that Hamas will end this war with its ability to attack Israel more or less intact.

All of this leads us to a very nasty conclusion. The Olmert-Livni-Barak government now leading Israel in its war against Hamas is no different from the Olmert-Livni-Peretz government that led Israel in the 2006 war against Hizbullah. Our leaders have learned nothing from their prior failure. Indeed they are reenacting it in Gaza today.

Therefore, Glick pleads, demands, prays that the government not send IDF ground troops into Gaza to fight a war that the government has already determined to lose.

It is painfully clear that the only hope for Israel's future, indeed, its very survival, hinges on the February 10th election when a realistic, hard-headed government led by Benjamin Netanyahu can be voted in.

Continue reading "ISRAEL'S GOVERNMENT SET TO HAND VICTORY TO HAMAS"

Posted by Republican on Friday, January 2, 2009 at 11:14 AM | Comments (0)
Email This | DIGG This | del.icio.us | Facebook | Stumble It

By the way, Hamas, the terrorist organization in control of Gaza, although a Sunni spinoff of the Muslim Brotherhood, is now almost 100% financed by Shiite Iran. So Iran evidences its support for Hamas and its war against the "enemy" Israel in every way and every place possible.

Click on the link below or paste it in your browser to see one such effort. You may have to register; it's free.

http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/1964.htm?auth=78dc2bca3072d58f8f2868122a01c621

Israel's present government doesn't have the stomach to stay the course. Even though the Israel Defense Forces are doing an outstanding job against Hamas and its facilities, the Olmert/Livni/Barak lame duck government is already looking for a way to end the battle short of victory. Now they are calling for international monitors, which are worse than a joke.

Israel agreed to end the Hezbollah war before victory and accepted international monitors in South Lebanon. The monitors do nothing and Hezbollah has rebuilt its munitions capabilty to a multiple of what they were before it started the 2006 war.

So the Olmert/Livni/Barak government wants the same thing to happen in Gaza? Madness. Israel is in a position to defeat Hamas and the IDF is welll on the way to doing that. It should do whatever it takes to achieve victory over Hamas. Hamas has made it clear it will never cease its war against Israel, so it must be destroyed.

The AP reporter in Gaza is Muslim and his bias favoring the Palestinians appears in every story. One example from today's report:

The military said aircraft also bombed smuggling tunnels along the Gaza-Egypt border, part of an ongoing attempt to cut off Hamas' last lifeline to the world outside the embattled Palestinian territory.

No, the smuggling tunnels are for smuggling weapons. The Rafeh crossing between Gaza and Egypt is open and is manned by Egypt. Traffic is two-way with supplies and wounded going to Egyptian hospitals.

Watch for the name Ibrahim Barzak: he slants the news. Today's news from Barzak:

Israel kills top Hamas figure, escalating campaign
By IBRAHIM BARZAK and AMY TEIBEL, Associated Press Writers
January 1, 2009, 11:30 a.m., Eastern Time

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip – Israel assassinated a Hamas strongman Thursday in its first assault on the top leadership of Gaza's rulers, escalating a crushing aerial offensive even as it declared it was ready to launch a ground invasion. The airstrike targeted the four-story apartment building that was home to 52-year-old Nizar Rayan, ranked among Hamas' top five decision-makers in Gaza. It also killed 12 other people including two of Rayan's four wives and four of his 12 children, Palestinian health officials said. The Muslim faith allows men to have up to four wives.

While intensifying its 6-day-old military offensive against Hamas in Gaza, Israel also appeared to be sounding out a possible diplomatic exit by demanding international monitors as a key term of any future truce.

Israel launched the offensive Saturday to crush militants who have been terrorizing southern Israel with rocket fire from Gaza.

The campaign began after more than a week of intense Palestinian rocket fire that followed the expiration of a six-month truce. Israeli warplanes have carried out some 500 sorties against Hamas targets, and helicopters have flown hundreds more combat missions, a senior Israeli military officer said Wednesday.

More than 400 Gazans have been killed and some 1,700 have been wounded, Gaza health officials said. The U.N. says the death toll includes more than 60 civilians, 34 of them children.

Three Israeli civilians and one soldier have also died in rocket attacks that have reached deeper into Israel than ever before, bringing one-eighth of the population within rocket range.

Israel has made clear that no one in Hamas is immune from attack and Thursday's strike drove that point home. It flattened Rayan's apartment building, sending a thick plume of smoke into the air and heavily damaged several neighboring buildings.

Hamas leaders went into hiding before Israel launched its operation, but Rayan was known for openly defying Israel.

A professor of Islamic law, Rayan was closely tied to Hamas' military wing and was respected in Gaza for donning combat fatigues and personally participating in clashes against Israeli forces. He sent one of his sons on an October 2001 suicide mission that killed two Israeli settlers in Gaza.

Throughout the day, huge blasts had rocked cities and towns across Gaza as Israeli warplanes went after Gaza's parliament building, militant field operatives, police and cars. The military said aircraft also bombed smuggling tunnels along the Gaza-Egypt border, part of an ongoing attempt to cut off Hamas' last lifeline to the world outside the embattled Palestinian territory.

So far, the campaign to crush rocket fire on southern Israel has been conducted largely from the air. But military spokeswoman Maj. Avital Leibovich said preparations for a ground operation were complete.

"The infantry, the artillery and other forces are ready. They're around the Gaza Strip, waiting for any calls to go inside," Leibovich said.

Hamas threatened to take revenge against Israeli soldiers who were massed along the border with Gaza, waiting for a signal to invade.

"We are waiting for you to enter Gaza to kill you or make you into Schalits," it said, referring to Sgt. Gilad Schalit who was seized by Hamas-affiliated militants 2- 1/2 years ago and remains in captivity.

Israeli Cabinet ministers have been unswayed by international calls to end the violence, which is to include a whirlwind trip around the region next week by French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Instead, they authorized the military to push ahead with its campaign against militants, who fired more than 30 rockets into Israel by late Thursday afternoon, according to the military. No injuries were reported, but an eight-story house in Ashdod, 23 miles from Gaza, was hit by a rocket that pierced through two floors.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told a meeting of mayors of southern communities Thursday that Israel would not shy from using its vaunted military power.

"We have no interest in a long war. We do not desire a broad campaign. We want quiet," Olmert said. "We don't want to display our might, but we will employ it if necessary."

Ordinary Israelis are not eager to see the operation expand beyond the air-based campaign, a poll Thursday showed.

Earlier this week, Olmert rebuffed a French proposal for a two-day suspension of hostilities. But at the same time, he seemed to be looking for a diplomatic way out, telling Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other world leaders that Israel wouldn't agree to a truce unless international monitors took responsibility for enforcing it, government officials said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks were confidential.

International intervention helped Israel to accept a truce that ended its 2006 war with Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas, when the U.N. agreed to station peacekeepers to enforce the terms. This time, Israel isn't seeking a peacekeeping force, but a monitoring body that would judge compliance on both sides.

The idea was floated before the offensive but did not gain traction because of the complications created by the existence of rival Palestinian governments in the West Bank and Gaza, defense officials said.

Gaza has been under Hamas rule since the militant group overran it in June 2007; the West Bank has remained under the control of moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who has been negotiating peace with Israel for more than a year but has no influence over Hamas. Bringing in monitors would require cooperation between the fierce rivals.

An Abbas confidant said the Palestinian president supports international involvement.

"We are asking for a cease-fire and an international presence to monitor Israel's commitment to it," Nabil Abu Rdeneh said.
----
Amy Teibel reported from Jerusalem.