Gaza City - Israel launched three more airstrikes in Gaza and an arrest raid Thursday morning in the West Bank, killing eight Palestinian militants and raising to 22 the death toll in just over 24 hours of spiralling tit-for-tat violence. The latest strike, in the early afternoon, killed a member of a rocket-launching cadre in the northern Gaza Strip.
The attack came several hours after a missile hit a car with Hamas militants in Gaza City, killing two, including the son of a high- ranking official in the radical Islamic movement ruling Gaza.
Another air attack earlier in the morning north of Gaza City, near the border with Israel, killed three militants who the Israeli military said were involved in the rocket launching.
The attacks follow nine airstrikes in Gaza Wednesday, including on a van with Hamas fighters, the Interior Ministry of the de-facto Hamas administration and on rocket launchers, which had left seven Hamas militants and four civilians dead, among them a five-month-old infant and two teens aged 12 and 13.
Israel launched the ferocious air campaign in retaliation for a barrage of Gaza-made rockets that landed in southern Israeli communities since the Wednesday morning targeted airstrike on the Hamas van in southern Gaza.
That targeted attack, in turn, was a response to earlier rocket attacks, but five senior Hamas fighters were killed and the Islamist movement responded by unleashing another 60 rockets and 10 mortar shells from the Strip by midnight, killing a 47-year-old Israeli civilian, lightly injuring another and sending dozens into shock.
Power was also knocked out in the coastal city of Ashqelon, a factory dining room was struck minutes after some 120 workers had left the room, a house in the town of Sderot suffered a direct hit, and rockets landed near a college in Sderot and a hospital in Ashqelon where many casualties of the rockets are often treated.
The bombardment continued also Thursday, with militants launching at least nine Gaza-made Qassam rockets and four mortar shells, a military spokeswoman said, bringing to nearly 100 the number of projectiles launched since Wednesday.
Hamas leader Ismail Haniya, who continues to call himself prime minister in Gaza despite his dismissal by President Mahmoud Abbas after Hamas' violent Gaza take-over in June, condemned the Israeli air campaign and said it was a sign of "hysteria" among the Israeli leadership.
"The Israeli aggressions and bombing the governmental buildings and the civilian institutions will not weaken the will and endurance of the Palestinian people," said Haniya in a written statement from sent to reporters from his hideout.
Haniya has gone underground following warnings by Israel that it will expand its targeted killings to Hamas' political leadership if the rocket attacks continue.
Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni called on the international community to respect the actions Israel was taking to defend its citizens.
"We do not accept the arguments and condemnations that there are casualties on both sides, since there is no moral equivalence between terrorists and those who fight them, even if in these actions innocent civilians are hurt," she said at the start of a meeting with the Lithuanian foreign minister.
Senior Abbas aide Saeb Erekat called on Israel to stop its "crimes" and accept a truce in Gaza to save the peace process, which was revived in November after a seven-year freeze, but has since been overshadowed by the violence in Gaza.
Israel, however, has thus far rejected a ceasefire, saying that it will not engage in talks with Hamas, which does not accept its right to exist. It has said the radical movement was "welcome" to stop the rocket attacks from Gaza anytime, at which point it too would stop its retaliatory airstrikes and ground incursions into the Strip.
Erekat said US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, due to leave for the Middle East Monday, was scheduled to meet Abbas Tuesday in a bid to push forward the peace process.
In Nablus on the northern West Bank, an Israeli army unit entered the city's Balate refugee camp on a "search and arrest raid," sparking a clash with gunmen of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the armed wing of Abbas' Fatah party, killing two and wounding a third.
Another al-Aqsa gunmen was also killed in Nablus on Wednesday, while an Islamic Jihad fighter died when a bomb exploded prematurely as he approached Gaza's central border with Israel, bringing the total Israeli and Palestinian death toll in the latest round of violence since Wednesday morning to 22.
