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Gaza/Occupied Jerusalem: Tens of thousands of Gazans on Friday protested against Israeli raids that have killed more than 30 Palestinians, as Israel mulled a major ground operation to stop rocket fire from the Hamas-run territory.
The demonstrators, in response to Hamas calls, poured into the streets throughout the impoverished and isolated territory to denounce Israel’s air strikes whose victims have included several children.
“They’ve killed my right to childhood,” read a sign held by a child, clad in a red-stained white funeral shroud, who attended a large rally in the northern town of Jabaliya.
Among the protesters in Gaza City was Khalil Al Hayyah, a Hamas leader who lost a 25-year-old son in an Israeli air strike on Thursday.
“We will never recognise Israel, even it it assassinates all our leaders and kills our children,” he shouted to the crowd.
A senior Hamas official earlier told worshippers at a Gaza City mosque that the coastal strip which the Islamists have ruled for more than eight months was faced with war.
“Gaza today faces a real war, a crazy war led by the enemy against our people,” said Esmail Haniya, the premier in a Hamas-led government which Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas fired after the Islamists seized control of Gaza.
Haniya lashed out at the US administration, which he claimed backs the Israeli attacks by portraying them as “legitimate self-defence.” He also accused the Arab world of “encouraging the Israeli aggression” through its silence.
In Israel, a senior defence official said that Palestinians firing rockets from the Gaza Strip would bring upon themselves what he termed a “shoah”, the Hebrew word for holocaust or disaster.
The word is rarely used in Israel outside discussions of the Nazi Holocaust of Jews. Many Israelis are loath to countenance its use to describe other contemporary events. Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said the Palestinians faced “new Nazis”.
Visiting Ashkelon, Defence Minister Ehud Barak told Channel 10 television an Israeli response was “required” and that “Hamas bears responsibility for this deterioration and it will also bear the results”.
Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai told Army Radio earlier that “the more Qassam [rocket] fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they [the Palestinians] will bring upon themselves a bigger ‘shoah’ because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.”
Vilnai’s spokesman said: “Mr. Vilnai was meaning ‘disaster’. He did not mean to make any allusion to the genocide.”
On Friday, six people, including three children aged five, six and 12, were wounded in Israeli raids targeting rocket launchers in the northern town of Jabaliya, medics and witnesses said.
During the same period, Gaza fighters have fired over 125 rockets at Israel, according to the Israeli army.
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