Gaza/Tel Aviv - Israel launched a series of airstrikes and Hamas bombarded southern Israel with rockets, as 11 Palestinians, among them a 5-month-old baby, and one Israeli civilian died in escalating violence in and from the Gaza Strip. The deepening conflict between Israel and Hamas, the militant Islamic movement ruling Gaza, has cast a dark shadow over negotiations between Israel and moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas of the rival Fatah party. The talks were renewed in November after a seven-year freeze in the peace process.
Israeli commandos in the West Bank city of Nablus shot to death a militant of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Fatah's armed wing.
A gunman from the militant Islamic Jihad was killed overnight in central Gaza when a bomb he was carrying exploded prematurely as he approached Israel's border, the Israeli military said, bringing the total death toll to 14.
The latest tit-for-tat violence came as US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is to depart Monday for Israel and the Palestinian West Bank territory for an update on the peace talks, the State Department said Wednesday in Washington.
Israel pounded the Interior Ministry building of the de-facto Hamas administration in Gaza City, as metal workshops for the production of rockets and other Hamas targets in six consecutive aerial attacks Wednesday night, an Israeli military spokeswoman said.
A 5-month-old baby was killed and four other civilians from nearby residential buildings were wounded in the airstrike on the severely damaged Interior Ministry, Gaza emergency services chief Mo'aweya Hassanein said.
Three Palestinian civilians, among them two children aged 12 and 13, and seven Hamas militants were killed in three earlier airstrikes on squads of militants firing rockets from northern Gaza, and on a van with Hamas fighters in the south of the Strip.
That airstrike near the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis Wednesday morning came after militants launched 17 rockets at southern Israel in the last two days, wounding a 10-year-old Israeli boy whose shoulder was shattered by shrapnel.
Hamas responded to the morning strike by unleashing another 50 rockets at Sderot, just north-east of Gaza, the coastal city of Ashqelon and their surroundings in the afternoon and evening.
One rocket struck within a metre of a parked car at the entrance of a college on Sderot's outskirts, killing the 47-year-old occupant and lightly wounding another Israeli.
Another rocket struck an electricity cable in Ashqelon, knocking out power, and yet another fell near the city's Barzilai hospital, where wounded from the rocket attacks in Sderot are regularly rushed for treatment.
A projectile scored a direct hit on a house in a Sderot residential neighbourhood, while another penetrated the dining room of a chicken-processing plant in an industrial zone on the town's outskirts, minutes after some 120 workers had finished eating there.
Israeli government spokesman David Baker said that Israel would continue its airstrikes and limited ground incursions against the "Palestinian terrorists in the Gaza Strip (who) are determined to kill and maim our civilians."
But Israel's Channel 10 television quoted security officials as saying that the military would launch no large-scale invasion of the Strip at this stage.
US State Department deputy spokesman Tom Casey called on Hamas to stop the rocket attacks, saying there was "no excuse" for them and condemning the death of the Israel motorist. Casey said that Israel has a right to defend itself against such attacks but urged the Olmert government to consider the consequences of its military actions.
Hamas blamed Israel for the violence and accused Abbas of "inciting the Zionist occupation to shed more blood in the Gaza Strip" by calling for an end to the daily rocket attacks.
Abbas had told a joint news conference with Egyptian President Hosny Mubarak that the rockets provided Israel with an "excuse" for its military operations and economic blockade against Gaza.
Abbas must end his "absurd negotiations" with the "Zionist enemy," said Ehad al-Ghussain, spokesman of the defacto, Hamas-led Interior Ministry in Gaza.
Abbas' spokesman, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, issued a statement condemning the Israeli attacks in Gaza and Nablus, saying Israel's "aggression" did not "serve the peace process nor negotiations."
The Palestinian president and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced last year in Annapolis, Maryland that they would try to reach a peace deal by the end of 2008, but the violence in Hamas- ruled Gaza as well as ongoing arguments over settlement construction have hampered talks.
Israel has said it will not implement any agreement so long as Abbas has no control over the volatile, Hamas-led Strip.
