GAZA, Thursday, June 29
Israel stepped up its confrontation on Wednesday with Palestinian militants over the capture of an Israeli soldier, battering northern Gazan towns with artillery and sending warplanes over the house of the Syrian president, who is influential with the Palestinian leader believed to have ordered the kidnapping.
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George Azar for The New York Times
Palestinian firefighters tried to douse the flames at one of six burning transformers at Gaza's main power station, bombed Wednesday by Israel.
In the West Bank city of Ramallah early on Thursday, Israeli forces detained 8 ministers of the 24-member
Hamas-led cabinet and 20 lawmakers, including Deputy Prime Minister Nasser Shaer and Labor Minister Mohammed Barghouti, security officials said.
The crisis seemed to be tipping toward escalation as Israeli
tanks hunkered down inside southern Gaza at the airport on Wednesday after warplanes had knocked out half of Gaza's electricity and pounded sonic booms over houses.
The Israeli defense minister, Amir Peretz, approved an extension of the incursion into northern Gaza, where Palestinian militants have been firing crude Qassam rockets into Israel. As of early Thursday, though, Israel denied reports that it was moving tanks into northern Gaza. About 9 p.m. Wednesday, after saying they would drop leaflets urging citizens of Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya to leave their homes, Israeli artillery batteries began to shell.
On Thursday, an Israeli warplane fired a missile in Gaza City that an Israel spokeswoman said hit a soccer field near the pro-Hamas Islamic University. Reuters reported that the missile hit inside the university.
Political leaders of Hamas on Wednesday joined the militants to demand the release of Palestinian women and
minors from Israeli jails in exchange for the soldier a condition that the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, rejected.
The choice, Israeli officials said, was the soldier's unconditional release or an escalation that could widen the conflict regionally: Haim Ramon, Israel's justice minister, raised the possibility of a strike in
Syria to kill Khaled Meshal, the exiled political leader of Hamas; the men who hold the Israeli soldier, Cpl. Gilad Shalit, 19, are believed to be following his orders.
"We won't hesitate to carry out extreme action to bring Gilad back to his family," Mr. Olmert said of the soldier, who was captured Sunday in an attack near Gaza led by Hamas.
In what the Israelis said was a message to the Syrian president,
Bashar al-Assad, four Israeli warplanes on Wednesday flew over his residence in Latakia, in northwest Syria, where he was believed to be staying. Syrian state television said Syrian air-defense systems had fired on the planes and forced them to flee.
Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, on Wednesday condemned Israel's attacks on infrastructure in Gaza, which disabled its only power plant and knocked down three bridges. In a statement, Mr. Abbas said he considered "the aggression that targeted the civilian infrastructures as collective punishment and crimes against humanity."
The crisis also spilled over into a second and
possibly third kidnapping. In Gaza, the Popular Resistance Committees, a militant group with ties to Hamas, displayed the identity card of an 18-year-old Israeli settler, Eliahu Asheri, whom it claimed to have kidnapped in the West Bank. Militants said they would kill him if Israel did not halt operations in Gaza, and early Thursday his body was found near Ramallah. Israeli media carried unconfirmed reports that a 60-year-old Israeli missing for two days had also been abducted.
Two Palestinians, ages 2 and 17, were reported killed Wednesday while playing with an unexploded Israeli shell in the town of Khan Yunis. But there were no reports of casualties in Israeli airstrikes.
There have been no reported skirmishes between the Israeli military and Palestinian militants, though the Israelis stayed largely out of reach at the airport. The airport, Israeli military officials say, will act as a staging ground for an operation that will
escalate until Corporal Shalit, reported to be wounded, is freed.
For the Israelis, the operation is aimed at deterring Hamas, which now leads the Palestinian government, from carrying out similar attacks in the future. Israeli newspapers carried articles on Wednesday speaking of the attacks on the infrastructure as a way to extract a concrete longer-term cost for the actions of the Palestinian leaders.
For many Palestinians in Gaza, the refusal to back down seemed a collective effort to highlight their own sense of grievance. The economy has broken down under an embargo of Western aid since Hamas took power in January. The Palestinians contend they remain under siege, even after the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza last year, with their borders often closed and encircled by Israeli warplanes and ships.
Ian Fisher reported from Gaza City for this article, and Steven Erlanger from Jerusalem.
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