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Netanyahu
Warns of Wider Israel Operation in Gaza.
The streets of Gaza City came under attack by the
Israeli military on Friday.
JERUSALEM — Even as Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Friday that he had ordered Israel’s military
to “prepare for the possibility of widening, significantly,” its ground
offensive in the Gaza Strip, troops operated mainly near Gaza’s borders in what
Israeli officials emphasized was a modest mission targeting tunnels into their
territory.
Mr. Netanyahu, who
acknowledged that “there is no guarantee of 100 percent success,” also offered
condolences to the family of an Israeli soldier killed in the first hours of
the ground offensive. And a Hamas-run radio station reported that three
siblings had been killed in the artillery shelling of an apartment building in
northern Gaza around noon Friday.
The recent fighting brought
the Palestinian death toll to above 260, with more than 20 killed since the
ground offensive began. Palestinian health officials have said that some 2,000
others have been injured. The Israeli military identified the soldier as Staff
Sgt. Eitan Barak, 20, from Herzliya.
Israeli tanks on Friday
near the town of Sderot at the border with Gaza.
Sergeant Barak was the
second Israeli casualty of the conflict that began on July 8; a 37-year-old
civilian was killed by mortar shells from Gaza as he distributed food to
soldiers massed near the border Tuesday night. Israeli news outlets reported
that the soldier was shot near Beit Hanoun, in northeast Gaza, possibly from
friendly fire, though a Twitter post from the Army said he was “fighting Hamas
terrorists.” He was posthumously promoted to staff sergeant from sergeant.
Al Aksa radio station,
which is run by Hamas, reported that three children of Ismail Abu Musalam —
Walaa, 12, Mohammed, 13, and Ahmed, 14 — had been killed when a shell hit their
bedroom in Al Nada housing block, close to the Erez crossing from Israel. Sami
Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, said on his Facebook page that Mr. Netanyahu “is
killing Gaza children but he will pay the price.”
The Israeli military said
that it had uncovered more than 20 “tunnel access points” in Gaza during the
ground campaign’s first hours, hit more than 150 sites in the coastal
territory, and killed at least 17 militants.
“We chose to go to this
operation after we exhausted the other options and with the understanding that
without this operation the price we pay will be much higher,” Mr. Netanyahu
said in a nationally televised address shortly before noon from the military
headquarters in Tel Aviv, where he had convened his top ministers. Mr.
Netanyahu said he had talked to world leaders to create “the international space,
something that should not be taken for granted, so we can act systematically
and with power against a murderous terror organization and its partners.”
President Obama said in
comments from the White House that he spoke with Mr. Netanyahu on Friday and
that he reaffirmed his “strong support for Israel’s right to defend itself” but
also said he was “deeply concerned about the risks of further escalation and
the loss of more innocent life.”
“No nation should accept
rockets being fired into its borders or terrorists tunneling into its
territory,” Mr. Obama told reporters, noting that a siren signaling incoming
rockets over Tel Aviv sounded during his phone conversation with Mr. Netanyahu
on Friday.
Mr. Netanyahu’s office said
in a statement that the prime minister had told the president after the siren
sounded that it was “the reality in which millions of Israeli citizens have
been living during the past number of days.” The Israeli leader also told Mr.
Obama that Hamas was “using the residents of Gaza as human shields” and was
therefore “responsible for the casualties,” according to the statement.
The United Nations Security
Council scheduled an emergency session on Gaza for Friday afternoon in New York,
at the request of Jordan. Turkey had also called for such a session, and its
prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, on Friday accused Israel of “committing
genocide” and said it “has never been a supporter of peace, has tyrannized and
continues to tyrannize.”
Israel had earlier ordered
the families of its diplomats and some staff to leave Turkey after violent
protests early Friday in front of Israel’s missions in Istanbul and Ankara.
Windows of the consulate office in central Istanbul were broken and graffiti
was scrawled on a nearby wall reading, “You should be left without descendants,
murderer Jew.” Parliamentarians from the governing Justice and Development
Party joined a similar demonstration outside the Israeli Embassy in Ankara.
Replay Video
Electricity had been cut in
most of Gaza because of downed cables that bring power from Israel, and street
battles in Gaza City and in northern and southern towns were reported on social
media.
Dozens of families fled
intense Israeli bombings in northern Gaza on foot and on donkey carts packed
with up to 10 people, including children and older adults. Explosions from
airstrikes could be seen, as well as outgoing rockets or mortars. Little else
moved in Gaza City, where streets were mostly deserted and shops were closed.
An exception was Shifa Hospital, where casualties continued to arrive,
including one body blown to pieces and a boy whose face was pockmarked by
shrapnel. Many staff members at the hospital have worked nearly nonstop for 11
days. A funeral was held nearby for two people killed overnight.
Residents of northern Gaza
said that Israeli tanks were not pushing deep into the territory but had
remained in position on a swath of sand, and that it was relatively calm at
midday after a night of shelling and machine-gun fire. Some said that they had
heard tank shells and that they thought Israel might be clearing the way for
further incursions later.
In the town of Khan Younis
in southern Gaza, at least nine people were killed overnight, including four
members of the Radwan family, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Residents of
Al Qarara, a neighborhood in eastern Khan Younis, said bulldozers were leveling
fields planted with crops near the border fence in eastern Gaza in what is
known as the “buffer zone” — a strip where Israel prevented planting for years
but lifted restrictions under a cease-fire agreement that ended the last Gaza
battle in 2012.
Israeli airstrikes have
also continued, with an F-16 hitting a villa belonging to the Khoudary family
near a building housing the local offices of Al Jazeera and The Associated
Press. Apache helicopters had earlier targeted an apartment in Al Jawhara tower,
which damaged the office of a Palestinian production company that serves
foreign news outlets.
Along the road that runs
parallel to Gaza’s eastern boundary and about a mile into Israeli territory,
dozens of tanks topped with Israeli flags were parked in fields, with soldiers
on standby. Clouds of dust covered the road in the wake of military vehicles on
the move in what had become a huge staging ground. The Israeli military has
begun calling up 18,000 more reservists, adding to the 50,000 already mobilized
for the campaign.
Sirens signaling rocket
attacks sounded all night and into the morning across Israel’s south; the army
counted more than 50 rockets from the 10 p.m. start of its ground invasion on
Thursday until 7 a.m. on Friday.
Khaled Meshal, the
political leader of Hamas, the Islamist movement that dominates Gaza and has
led the battle against Israel that began July 8, told Agence France-Presse from
his base in Qatar on Friday that the ground operation was “bound to fail.”
“What the occupier Israel
failed to achieve through its air and sea raids, it will not be able to achieve
with a ground offensive,” Mr. Meshal was quoted as saying by the agency.
Gazans Told to Evacuate
Areas where the Israel
Defense Forces dropped leaflets urging Gaza residents to leave their homes
before the ground assault. Arrows indicate
where they were told to go.
President Mahmoud Abbas of
the Palestinian Authority, whose meetings in Cairo on Wednesday and Thursday
failed to produce a cease-fire agreement, told reporters there that the ground
operation would “lead to more bloodshed and complicate efforts to end the
aggression,” according to WAFA, the official Palestinian news agency. Mr. Abbas
was scheduled to travel to Turkey and perhaps Qatar on Friday to continue
cease-fire discussions.
The Israeli Home Front
Command banned gatherings of more than 1,000 people as far north as Tel Aviv
and Jerusalem, and in the communities close to Gaza, summer camps were canceled
and groups of more than 300 were not allowed.
In the West Bank city of
Hebron, the families of the three men that the Israeli authorities have said
are the prime suspects in the June 12 abduction and subsequent murder of three
Israeli teenagers — a crime that Israel blamed on Hamas and that began the
escalation that led to the conflict in Gaza — received notices that their homes
would be demolished Friday. Israeli forces damaged the homes weeks ago.
On Thursday, three
ultra-Orthodox Israeli Jews, a 29-year-old with a history of psychiatric problems
and two of his teenage relatives, were indicted on charges of kidnapping and
killing a 16-year-old Palestinian boy in Jerusalem on July 2 in an apparent
revenge attack the morning after the three Israeli teenagers’ funerals.
Secretary of State John Kerry
of the United States spoke to Mr. Netanyahu after the ground forces moved into
Gaza. Mr. Kerry urged a “precise” operation focused on the tunnels, as Mr.
Netanyahu’s office and other senior Israeli leaders had indicated as the
operation was announced.
“The secretary emphasized
the need to avoid further escalation” and urged a cease-fire based on a
proposal presented by Egypt earlier this week, according to a State Department
statement. “The secretary also reiterated our concern about the safety and
security of civilians on both sides and the importance of doing everything
possible to prevent civilian casualties.”
The United Nations
estimates that three-quarters of the Palestinians killed in the operation were
not militants and that the victims include more than 50 children. Palestinian
health officials have counted at least 20 minors killed in recent days: four
were killed in an airstrike as they played on a Gaza City rooftop at around 6
p.m. on Thursday, and four others — cousins — were bombed as they kicked a ball
on the beach at around 4 p.m. on Wednesday.
The United Nations
secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, said overnight that he regretted the ground
offensive and urged Israel to “do more” to prevent civilian casualties, news
agencies reported, while the French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, called on
Israel to show “utmost restraint.”
Mr. Netanyahu said on
Friday that Israel’s is “a moral army like no other,” and “does not aspire to
hurt even one innocent person, not even one.” He blamed Hamas and other
militant groups for using “their citizens as human shields,” and said he was
“sorry for every mistaken strike on civilians.”
Chris Gunness of the United
Nations Relief and Works Agency said on Friday that many in the southern Gaza
town of Khan Younis had been displaced by the violence. The agency, which
serves the more than half of Gaza’s 1.7 million residents classified as
Palestinian refugees, is sheltering about 22,000 Gazans in 23 spots in Gaza
City and in the north of the strip, Mr. Gunness said.
In Canada, a staunch ally
of Israel, Foreign Minister John Baird said the ground incursion “could have
been avoided” if Hamas had accepted Egypt’s cease-fire proposal, as Israel
initially did, and said the Gaza group therefore “bears responsibility for the
further tragic loss of life.”
The Israeli military
released footage of a captain giving his soldiers a last-minute briefing before
heading into Gaza.
“I don’t think I need to
explain to you why we are doing what we are doing,” he said, according to a
translation posted on the Times of Israel news site. “I am confident in what we
are doing, because it is our right to be free in our land. It’s not a slogan,
it’s the truth.”
Correction:
July 18, 2014
An earlier version of this
article based on erroneous information provided by a Foreign Ministry spokesman
misstated the orders Israel has given its diplomats in Turkey. It has ordered
the families of diplomats and some staff to leave that country; it has not
ordered the diplomats themselves to leave.
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