Israeli Fire Kills 31 in Gaza as Hamas Warns Foreign Airlines, Declares Truce Talks Over
Thirty-one Palestinians have been killed and at least 120 wounded by Israeli strikes across Gaza since the collapse of a temporary truce, the emergency services said Wednesday.
And the armed wing of Hamas warned foreign airlines against flying into Tel Aviv, threatening to step up its six-week conflict with Israel and declaring truce talks in Cairo over.
"We are warning international airlines and press them to stop flying into Ben Gurion airport from 6 am (0300 GMT) Thursday," said Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades spokesman Abu Obeida in a televised speech.
Dressed in military fatigues with his face wrapped in a red and white chequered headscarf, he said Hamas was abandoning efforts to negotiate a durable ceasefire with Israel at Egyptian-brokered talks.
"We are calling on the Palestinian delegation to withdraw immediately from Cairo and not to return," said Abu Obeida in a speech broadcast on Hamas's Al-Aqsa TV channel.
"There will be no return to talks after today and any move in this direction will never achieve any result," he added.
"The enemy lost a golden chance to reach a ceasefire with limited demands, for which it will pay after today."
And Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the leaders of "terrorist organizations" are legitimate targets and warned that "no one is immune from our fire".
"Our policy is the following: if Hamas fires, we will hit back with more force and if they don't understand today, they will understand tomorrow and if not tomorrow then after tomorrow," Netanyahu said.
The wife and seven-month-old son of the Qassam Brigades' commander Mohammed Deif were killed in an Israeli air strike on a building in Gaza City late Tuesday, but Hamas said Deif was still alive.
"The Zionist enemy failed to assassinate general commander Abu Khaled," said the spokesman, using Deif's nom de guerre.
Also among those killed on Wednesday were three women, one of them heavily pregnant, and nine children. That number includes the woman's unborn baby, whom medics tried but ultimately failed to save, he said.
Two cousins, Mohammed al-Abeet, 16, and Saher al-Abeet, 11, were killed in an air strike on a house in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, Qudra said.
The violence resumed at around 1300 GMT on Tuesday when three rockets struck southern Israel with the air force hitting back with strikes which continued through the night and into Wednesday.
The first deadly strike killed Deif's second wife, Widad, 27, and his seven-month-old son Ali.
Rescue workers on Wednesday also pulled the bodies of a 48-year-old woman and a 14-year-old boy from the rubble, Qudra said.
Shortly before dawn, an air strike hit a home in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, killing eight, among them the pregnant woman, her unborn baby, three children and three men.
Later in the morning, another child, aged four, was killed along with a man in his 20s in a strike on Zeitun in southern Gaza City, Qudra said.
Four other men were killed in three separate strikes, two of whom died when a missile hit their motorcycle in the northern town of Beit Lahiya. At their funeral, both were wrapped in green Hamas flags, indicating they were militants.
Separately a man also died of injuries sustained earlier in the conflict, which erupted on July 8.
At least 2,049 Palestinians and 67 people on the Israeli side have now been killed since the conflict began on July 8, more than 20 of those Palestinians since fighting resumed late Tuesday.
Army figures show that since the truce collapsed, Gaza militants have fired 137 rockets over the border, of which 94 hit southern and central Israel while another 24 were shot down.
In the same period, the army hit 92 targets across Gaza, a spokeswoman said.
On the Israeli side, 67 people have died, including 64 soldiers killed in combat and three civilians killed by rocket fire - one of them a Thai national.
The army says five of the soldiers were killed by "friendly fire".
The U.N. says around three-quarters of the victims in Gaza are civilians. Sixty-four of the Israeli dead were soldiers.
Egyptian mediators scrambled for weeks to push the warring sides to agree a decisive end to the bloodshed, but their latest attempts collapsed on Tuesday when the fighting resumed.
Several thousand angry mourners joined the funeral procession for Deif's 27-year-old wife and seven-month-old son in the Jabaliya refugee camp, shouting "Allahu Akbar" (God is greatest) and demanding revenge.
Deif heads Hamas's armed wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, which vowed to open the "gates of hell" on Israel in retaliation for the killings.
Shortly after the funeral, Hamas said Deif was alive and directing operations against Israel.
"Those living around the Gaza border will not return home until Mohammed Deif decides," Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said.
"Abu Khaled is still alive and leading the military operation," a source close to the Islamist movement told AFP, using Deif's nom-de-guerre.
Israel's Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman agreed that Hamas was dictating the pace of the conflict, calling for military action to overpower the movement.
"This policy of 'quiet for quiet' effectively means that Hamas is the initiator and the one deciding when, where and how to shoot at Israeli citizens," he wrote on his Facebook page.
"Hamas is controlling the height of the flames and chooses when to disturb life for people in Israel," he said.
"There is no other option other than decisive action with one meaning - toppling Hamas."
The mourners, firing Kalashnikovs, buried Widad and her son Ali, who died alongside another woman and a teenager when a missile slammed into a six-storey building in Gaza City late on Tuesday.
It was the first deadly air strike August 10.
Their bodies were wrapped in green Hamas flags and they were carried to the cemetery with the bodies of two men killed in a strike on a motorcycle, both presumed Hamas militants.
Grief-stricken, Widad's father Mustafa Harb Asfura carried his tiny grandson into the mosque then to the cemetery, his body wrapped in a white sheet exposing his white face with an injury to the eye.
"My daughter knew she would die a martyr when she decided to marry Mohammed Deif," he told AFP.
In Israel, Interior Minister Gideon Saar justified the attack, calling Deif -- who has escaped five previous assassination attempts -- a legitimate target.
"Mohammed Deif deserves to die just like (the late al-Qaida leader Osama) bin Laden. He is an arch murderer and as long as we have an opportunity we will try to kill him," Saar told army radio.
Source: Agence France Presse
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