Israeli cabinet weighs expanding Gaza operations

By Staff
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JERUSALEM, Nov 22 (Reuters) Israel's security cabinet met today to consider stepping up military assaults in Gaza to counter a wave of Palestinian rocket attacks that have killed two Israelis in the past week.

Right-wing politicians have demanded Prime Minister Ehud Olmert take tougher action to halt the salvos amid growing frustration in Israeli towns and villages that border Gaza.

Militants say the rockets are a response to Israeli army assaults, including artillery shelling on November 8 that killed 19 civilians in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun. Israel said it made a targeting error.

''The Qassam rockets are lethal attacks aimed specifically at Israeli civilians,'' David Baker, an official in Olmert's office, said after one rocket landed near a school in the town of Sderot today. No one was hurt.

''No country would tolerate this and Israel surely will not.'' One Defence Ministry source said the cabinet was split between those pressing for a full-scale offensive in the Gaza Strip and other ministers seeking a political solution.

The decision might be to step up pin-pointed ground operations against militants in Gaza and possibly increase the use of tanks, the source said.

Olmert, aware of the international scrutiny of Israel's operations in Gaza, last week appeared to rule out a massive assault, saying rockets could not be halted in ''one fell swoop''.

Political sources said some Israeli officials had mooted the idea of an internationally brokered deal to end the fighting and possibly allow deployment of foreign peacekeepers in Gaza, but discussion was at a very early stage.

Israel is watching whether thousands of international troops arrayed across southern Lebanon can keep the peace in the wake of the Jewish state's war with Hezbollah guerrillas in July and August. That conflict was sparked when Hezbollah abducted two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid.

CLASHES In fresh fighting in Gaza, Israeli forces killed a gunman from the ruling Hamas movement in northern Gaza, Palestinian hospital officials said.

The army said one soldier was moderately wounded when he was hit by an anti-tank rocket near Beit Hanoun.

Several other Palestinians were wounded, including two schoolgirls who were hit by Israeli gunfire in Beit Hanoun, hospital officials said.

Yesterday, a rocket killed an Israeli man in Sderot. The 44-year-old welder was the second Israeli killed by a rocket from Gaza in less than a week, an unusually high toll.

Militants have fired nearly 100 homemade rockets at Israel since the November 8 shelling of Beit Hanoun.

Israeli forces and settlers quit Gaza last year, but the military renewed ground operations after militants captured an Israeli soldier in a deadly border raid in June.

Israel has killed more than 370 Palestinians in Gaza, about half of them civilians, since it began the offensive, hospital officials and residents say. Three Israeli soldiers have been killed.

Reuters LL GC1502

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