Waves of Israeli airstrikes hit Hamas security facilities in Gaza on Saturday in a crushing response to the group’s rocket fire, killing more than 200 — the highest one-day toll in an Israeli military operation against Palestinians in decades.
Israeli military officials said the airstrikes, which went on into the night, were the start of what could be days or even months of an effort to force Hamas to end its rocket barrages into southern Israel. The operation could ultimately include ground forces, a senior Israeli security official said.

JERUSALEM (AFP) — Israel threatened on Sunday to launch a major offensive against the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip as violence simmered around the impoverished territory days after the end of a truce with the Islamists.
The two frontrunners in the race to become prime minister after a snap election in February both vowed to topple Hamas, which has run Gaza since violently seizing power there in June 2007.

JERUSALEM (AFP) — Israel said on Friday it will maintain its closure of the Gaza Strip despite international concern over a deterioration of the humanitarian situation in the aid-dependent Palestinian territory.
“This decision was taken because of the continuation of Palestinian rocket attacks against southern Israel,” said Peter Lerner, a defence ministry spokesman.
A rocket fired from Gaza exploded near the port city of Ashkelon early on Friday without causing casualties or damage, army radio said.

Israel’s prime minister says the five-month truce with Hamas in the Gaza Strip has been “shattered” following 13 days of tit-for-tat attacks.
Ehud Olmert told an Israeli cabinet meeting on Sunday that he had ordered security chiefs to draw up plans to end rocket and mortar attacks on southern Israel, news agency AFP reported.
Olmert made the remarks shortly after four Palestinian fighters from the Popular Resistance Committees were killed in an Israeli air attack in northern Gaza.

Occupied Jerusalem: Jordan’s King Abdullah asked Israeli leaders at a secret meeting in Amman this week to refrain from a large-scale incursion into the Gaza Strip, an Israeli political source said on Thursday.
The source, confirming Israeli radio stations’ reports, said Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert declined to give a guarantee, saying Israel “cannot restrain itself for long” and might invade Gaza if fighters continued firing rockets into Israel.

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel stood fast Wednesday by its decision to clamp shut cargo crossings at the Gaza Strip, brushing off pleas to ease the blockade from United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon.
Israel sealed the passages two weeks ago after a 5-month-old truce between Israel and Gaza militants started unraveling in an effort to halt rocket and mortar fire at Israeli border towns.

A car bomb has killed one of Israel’s most prominent crime bosses in Tel Aviv, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reports.
Israeli police identified the dead man on Monday as Yaakov Alperon, the head of one of the country’s most powerful crime families.
Alperon is the most senior figure to be killed and the latest casualty of ongoing gang wars that have left scores of people dead.

An Israeli air strike killed four militants in the Gaza Strip on Sunday and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said he had commissioned a plan for military action in the Hamas-run territory should rocket attacks on Israel persist. “I ordered security chiefs to present their proposals to me as soon as possible so that an orderly plan of action could, if necessary, be brought to the decision-makers in the government for approval,” Olmert told his cabinet, in broadcast remarks.