Tel Aviv/Gaza - The first several hours of Israel's long-
expected ground invasion saw fierce fighting as tanks arrived early
Sunday at Gaza City and troops advanced to Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun
in the northern Gaza Strip.
Launched late Saturday, Israeli infantry and armour, backed by air
support, moved into the north of the territory after an artillery
barrage lasting hours. Early casualty reports were sketchy.
Palestinian militants immediately confronted the Israelis,
sparking what the Islamic Hamas movement, which controls Gaza, said
in a statement were 'heavy and tough exchanges of fire and armed
clashes.'
Hamas' armed wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, said in its own
statement that the Israelis were falling into 'the trap that our
fighters had prepared for its soldiers and tanks.'
Reports from inside the strip described explosions, heavy machine-
gun fire and shelling by Israeli tanks. The preceding bombing
campaign continued overnight, and television footage from Gaza showed
fires and billowing smoke.
The Israeli military said the ground operation was the second
stage of the Israeli offensive, which began December 27, and was
intended to destroy Hamas installations in the area of operations and
to impede militants' firing of rockets at Israel.
The military said in a statement that the ground operation was not
aimed at the residents of Gaza but noted that 'anyone who hides a
terrorist or weapons in his house is considered a terrorist.'
Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak warned in a televised
statement Saturday night that the ground campaign would be neither
easy nor short.
The entry of ground troops into Gaza had been expected for days,
after Israel called up and deployed thousands of reservists along the
border, while the air offensive continued unabated.
Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev told Arabic broadcaster
al-Jazeera: 'We have no intention of reoccupying the Gaza Strip. We
did not pull out of Gaza in 2005 to return on the New Year's Eve in
2009.'
He insisted that the ground operation 'is not offensive but
defensive. If there were not rockets raining down on our civilian
people in the southern part of the country, we would not have to
act.'
The Israel Air Force (IAF) attacked 40 targets Saturday in the
Gaza Strip, and Militants in the enclave continued launching rockets
at the Jewish state even with the invasion underway.
In the first hours of the ground assault, at least 30 Hamas
fighters were killed, according to Israeli army sources. BBC and al-
Jazeera each reported Hamas casualties of four dead, citing
Palestinian sources.
There were no official reports of casualties from Israeli forces,
though Hamas claimed to have killed nine soldiers. Palestinian
civilian casualties overnight in the densely populated Gaza Strip
were unknown.
For the first time since the offensive began one week ago, Israeli
artillery guns positioned along the border opened up in the late
afternoon in what turned out to be a 'softening up' prior to the
ground incursion.
The artillery barrage continued for several hours. It was unclear
whether it was an artillery shell or an airstrike that hit a mosque
in the late afternoon in the northern strip, killing 11 Palestinians
and wounding 50 others, 24 of them seriously. The Israeli military
has accused Palestinian militants of using mosques as weapons depots
and even as rocket-launching bases.
An IAF strike early Saturday killed a top Hamas commander, the
third high-ranking leader of the Islamist group to be slain in the
eight days of the Israeli offensive. Zakaria al-Jamal was a battalion
commander in the Hamas military wing and head of the movement's
rocket-launching squads in Gaza City, the Israeli military said.
Other targets hit in the IAF strikes included a college, which the
military statement said had been used as a rocket-launching base, and
the homes of two Hamas militants. One home had been used as a weapons
depot and the other as a meeting place to plan attacks, the IAF
statement said.
Four Palestinians were killed in a strike on Rafah in southern
Gaza, bringing Saturday's death toll to at least 19.
Reports from Gaza said Israeli aircraft attacked two bridges in
the centre of the strip, making movement harder between the south of
the enclave and Gaza City in the north.
Gaza militants continued to launch rockets and mortar shells at
Israel, with around 15 attacks reported including six with long-range
Grad missiles.
One Grad hit a building in the port city of Ashdod, slightly
wounding two people and causing damage to the building.
Israel launched its 'Operation Cast Lead' in response to a week of
heavy rocket barrages on the Jewish state out of the Gaza Strip,
following the end of a shaky six-month truce between Israel and Hamas
leaders in the territory.
Some 461 Palestinians have been killed in the hundreds of Israeli
strikes and around 2,300 wounded.
The approximately 450 Palestinian rockets and mortars launched
since the start of the operation have left four Israelis killed,
three of them civilians, and dozens more wounded.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) has said that
at least a quarter of the Palestinian casualties are civilian.
In New York, the United Nations held an emergency meeting after
the start of the Israeli invasion but was unable to reach agreement
on a resolution.
USA
Your Talkback on this Story