Hamas security forces also reported Saturday’s strikes. There were no immediate reports of casualties.

The Israeli air force struck two “smuggling tunnels” on the southern Gaza border and one “weaponry storage site” in Gaza City, a military spokesman told CNN.

“In all strikes, a hit was identified,” the spokesman said, adding that the strikes were in response to six rockets targeting Israeli since Saturday morning.

According to the Israeli military, more than 100 rockets, mortar shells and missiles have been fired at Israel by Palestinian militants in Gaza since Hamas leaders announced a cease-fire on January 18.

Israel also announced a cease-fire and pulled its troops out of Gaza in January, ending a three-week military campaign that the Israeli military said was aimed at halting the rocket fire.

Egypt has been trying to broker a broader cease-fire agreement between Hamas and Israel. Israel is demanding that Hamas release kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit before it fully reopens the border crossings with Gaza.

Hamas has rejected discussing Shalit’s release as part of any cease-fire negotiation.

Israel launches airstrikes into Gaza – CNN.com

The raids targeted one of the positions of the rebel Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, or FDLR, said Oliver Hamuli, the spokesman for the military operation.

The group is made up primarily of ethnic Hutus from Rwanda who fled across the border into Congo following the 1994 slaughter of more than 500,000 mostly ethnic Tutsi civilians.

“The death toll from this attack is more than 40 dead and several hurt — all on the FDLR side,” said Hamuli, the spokesman for a joint Rwanda-Congo military operation aimed at stamping out the remnants of the Hutu militia.

He said the attack took place late Thursday in Kashebere, in the eastern Congo region of Masisi. The FDLR commanders were in the midst of a meeting when the air raids began. A few miles (kilometers) away, a second attack took place.

“The death toll there was high as well. The survivors threw the bodies in the river,” Hamuli said.

The echoes of Rwanda’s genocide are still being felt in Congo nearly 15 years later. The presence of the FDLR in Congo’s terraced hills has destabilized the region, giving rise to a counter rebel group, made up of Congolese Tutsis. While that group claimed to be protecting Congo’s Tutsi minority from the Hutu militia, it too is now accused of grave abuses.

Congo has long accused Rwanda of backing the Tutsi militia — known as the CNDP. Rwanda, on the other hand, has accused Congo of aiding the FDLR and the two countries twice went to war over the issue.

But in a recent turn, Congo agreed to join forces with Rwanda in order to finally root out the last of the FDLR. The joint operation began last month. Congo’s President Joseph Kabila, however, gave a news conference to make it known that he expects troops from his former enemy to leave Congolese territory by the end of February.

More than 40 rebels killed in Congo air raid – Los Angeles Times

Israeli aircraft late on Sunday targeted an empty police station in central Gaza and some seven tunnels along the Gaza Strip’s southern border with Egypt, witnesses said.

The action came two weeks after the end of an Israeli offensive that devastated the impoverished territory and left more than 1,300 Palestinians dead.

There were no reports of casualties in the latest strikes on the Hamas outpost and the tunnels, used for importing weapons and goods from Egypt into the Gaza Strip, where Israel enforces a punishing blockade.

The army confirmed carrying out strikes “in response to barrages of Qassam rockets and mortar shells fired at Israel.”

According to witnesses, hundreds of Palestinian workers involved in tunnel construction in southern Gaza fled to the Egyptian side of the border shortly after the bombing began.

Palestinian militants in Gaza fired more than 10 rockets and mortar rounds onto southern Israel on Sunday, wounding one civilian and two soldiers.

Defence Minister Ehud Barak said although most of the rockets were not fired by Hamas, the Islamist movement — which has controlled Gaza since June 2007 — bore the responsibility for the attacks.

“We are responding and we will continue to retaliate. We know that most of the fire was not carried out by Hamas but by other small organisations, but Hamas is responsible. Hamas must act to stop this.

“We need calm in the south, and that is the test…. If there is no calm we will have to act again,” Barak, who heads the centre-left Labour party in the upcoming February 10 elections, warned on public radio.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Sunday vowed to deal “a severe and disproportionate Israeli response” to the new rocket fire.

The renewed air strikes come nine days before Israelis go to the polls.

Hamas slammed the Israeli threats as a “campaign stunt” before the election.

“This is an attempt… to destroy the Egyptian efforts to improve the calm,” spokesman Taher al-Nunu said in Gaza.

The Hamas spokesman did not say whether the Islamist group was behind the latest rocket fire, but called on “all groups to respect the national decision concerning the ground situation in Gaza.”

At least 15 rockets have been fired since mutual ceasefires by Israel and Hamas on January 18 brought an end to the 22-day war in which 13 Israelis also died.

Egypt has been leading international efforts to consolidate the ceasefires into a lasting truce.

To that end Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, whose rule is confined to the Israeli-occupied West Bank, is due to meet Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on Monday in Cairo.

Abbas on Sunday accused Hamas, which routed forces loyal to him when it seized power in 2007, of putting Palestinian lives and their hopes for statehood in peril.

He also accused the Islamists of trying to smash the Palestine Liberation Organisation and said he rejected talks with any group which did not recognise the PLO.

Khaled Meshaal, who heads Hamas’s politburo from exile in Damascus, said earlier in the week that the PLO had become obsolete and called for “a new, national authority.”

His comments were not supported by Hamas-allied militants, who said the PLO should be reformed rather than replaced.

Meshaal on Sunday ruled out any permanent ceasefire until Israel ends a crippling blockade it imposed on Gaza after the Islamists seized power.

But an Israeli official said the Jewish state “is not ready to adhere to any agreement that has a time-limit. We want a deal that will be valid for as long as the sides respect it.”

AFP: Israel threatens more Gaza strikes

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel expressed regret for the strike but said that Israeli forces were fired on by Hamas militants from just outside the UN compound and that the militants then ran inside to take cover, according to Olmert’s spokesman, Mark Regev.

The UN secretary general, Ban Ki Moon, said that Defense Minister Ehud Barak of Israel had told him the strike on the UN compound was a “grave mistake.” Ban, who was in Israel on Thursday to press for a cease-fire, said that he expressed “strong protest and outrage” to Israel. Relations between Israel and the UN offices in Palestinian territory, long strained, have worsened during the Israeli campaign.

On the 20th day of fighting, Israeli ground forces pushed deeper into Gaza City and intensified shelling in both outlying neighborhoods and central districts, sending thousands of panicked residents fleeing from their homes, witnesses said. Al-Shurouq Tower, a high-rise media center, was hit by shells, witnesses said. At least two television cameramen were hospitalized.

In what appeared to be a breakthrough for the Israeli military, Israeli and Palestinian media reported that Israel had killed a senior Hamas official in the bombing of his home.

Two days ago, Israeli officials said, despite heavy air and ground assaults, Israel had yet to cripple the military wing of Hamas or halt its rocket fire into Israel.

The slain official, Said Siam, was the interior minister in Hamas-run Gaza, and was in charge of security. Islamic Jihad radio said Siam’s brother and son had also been killed. In addition, the strike killed four members of a family next door, Gaza hospital officials said.

The intensified Israeli campaign came as cease-fire talks in Egypt appeared to be moving forward. A senior Israeli defense official, Amos Gilad, returned from Cairo after a day of talks with Egyptian officials. He was due to report to the Israeli leadership later Thursday. “We are trying to find a durable solution and hopefully that durable solution seems closer than ever before,” Regev said.

Within two hours on Thursday morning, militants in Gaza fired 15 rockets and mortars against Israel, the Israeli military said, a marked increase in fire compared with Wednesday when there were 16 launches during the entire day. Later Thursday, the military reported that 25 rockets and mortars had been fired. One struck the Israeli city of Beersheba, directly hitting a car and wounding six people, the Israeli military said. Among them was a 7-year-old boy, whose wounds were serious.

The death toll for Palestinians rose to at least 1,076, Reuters reported, which quoted the Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza. At least 13 Israelis have been killed.

Christopher Gunness, a spokesman for the UN Relief and Works Agency, which is charged with helping Palestinian refugees, said that the Israelis had been provided with the GPS coordinates of all UN facilities in Gaza. He said that in the strike Thursday on the UN compound two buildings had been set ablaze and that there were five fully laden fuel vehicles at the site.

He rejected the Israeli claim that militants had fired from in or near the compound as “entirely baseless.”

“With every false allegation, the credibility of those accusing us is incrementally diminished,” he said.

He said that Israel had used three shells of white phosphorous at the compound, according to people at the site, citing the fact that fires caused by the shells had burned all day as evidence that the chemical was used.

White phosphorous creates smoke on a battlefield and can burn like a kind of napalm. There was no immediate response from Israel.

The strike on the UN compound resembled an earlier incident in Israel’s campaign against Hamas, when Israeli mortar shells landed outside a UN school compound in Jabaliya, in northern Gaza, killing at least 40 Palestinians, according to UN and hospital officials.

In that attack, the Israeli military said that it was responding to mortars fired by Hamas militants from a yard next to the school compound, and that one of the shells that it fired back fell off the mark.

The attacks have worsened decades of tensions between Israel and the United Nations. Israel views some branches of the UN as hostile and unfair, particularly the Relief and Works Agency, with its focus on helping Palestinians.

Regev, Olmert’s spokesman, played down the tensions, saying that Israel “fully supports the United Nations’ humanitarian mission.”

But Yigal Palmor, a Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman, said that a large number of the local workers for the UN refugee agency “one way or another are affiliated with Hamas,” which presents problems at a time of confrontation.

The Israeli military gave only limited information about its latest ground operations in Gaza City on Thursday, but a spokesman said that “fierce fighting” was under way “relatively deep inside Gaza.”

Overnight, the military said, Israeli planes struck about 70 targets, including a mosque in the southern town of Rafah that it said was used to stockpile rockets, and several squads of gunmen.

Palestinians arrived with wounded relatives at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City on Thursday, some barefoot and in nightgowns. They told of intense Israeli shelling in several neighborhoods, including the Sabra and Tufah districts. The two television cameramen arrived for treatment after the tower in central Gaza housing the media offices was hit. They had been filming from a window balcony when they were wounded, they said.

Residents of the Tel el-Hawa district in southwestern Gaza City said that Israeli shelling and shooting had gone on all night and that the Quds Hospital was under fire.

Amid rising concern about the humanitarian situation in Gaza, the aid group CARE said that Israeli bombs were falling around its warehouses and distribution sites in Gaza, forcing it to cancel the dissemination of food and medical supplies.

The group said in a statement that it had been planning to give emergency medical supplies to hospitals and clinics, and get baby food and blankets to newborns in shelters.

Martha Myers, CARE’s director for the West Bank and Gaza, said that on Wednesday bombs fell near a care warehouse and “our staff had to drop and run.”

“This is not humanitarian access,” she said in the CARE statement.

Isabel Kershner reported from Jerusalem. Ethan Bronner and Sabrina Tavernise contributed reporting from Jerusalem; Souad Mekhennet contributed from Frankfurt; Michael Slackman from Cairo; Alan Cowell from London; and Graham Bowley from New York.

UN outraged after Israel shells its aid compound – International Herald Tribune

After effectively bisecting the Gaza Strip over the weekend, the Israeli military announced that it had seized high-rise buildings and attacked tunnels at the edge of Gaza City. Further advances by the Israeli military would bring it into the heart of the Gaza’s major city.

Diplomatic efforts continued, but showed no tangible results as Israel insisted that it was justified in continuing its invasion until it was assured that Hamas, which controls Gaza, would cease its rocket fire at the Jewish state’s southern flank.

Despite the days of fierce bombings and invasion over the weekend, Hamas today continued its rocket attacks, launching more than 30 rockets at southern Israeli cities such as Ashkelon, Ashdod, Netivot and Ofakim.

European leaders continued to call for a resumption of the truce between Israel and Hamas. French President Nicolas Sarkozy met with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, whose authority has been limited to the West Bank since his faction lost control of Gaza to Hamas in June 2007.

At a joint news conference, Sarkozy called for a cease-fire before heading for Israel.

“We in Europe want a cease-fire as quickly as possible, and that everyone understands that time is running against peace,” Sarkozy said. “The guns must fall silent, there must be a humanitarian truce.”

In Washington, President Bush again defended Israel’s actions.

“I understand Israel’s desire to protect itself,” Bush said. “The situation now taking place in Gaza was caused by Hamas.”

Bush spoke after meeting with Salva Kiir, the leader of Sudan’s troubled South. With Kiir sitting next to him, Bush spoke to reporters in remarks televised from the Oval Office.

“Instead of caring about the people of Gaza, Hamas decided to use Gaza to launch rockets to kill innocent Israelis,” Bush said. “Israel’s obviously decided to protect herself and her people.”

Bush again said he was concerned about the growing humanitarian crisis in Gaza, cut off from supplies. He said the United States was prepared to supply additional aid. Israel reported that eighty trucks loaded with humanitarian aid were transferred into the Gaza Strip via the Kerem Shalom crossing.

The violence must end, “but not at the expense of an agreement that does not prevent the crisis from happening again,” Bush said.

Meanwhile, President-elect Barack Obama continued to steer clear of foreign affairs, concentrating on the economy in Washington.

“I will continue to insist that when it comes to foreign affairs it is particularly important to adhere to the principle of one president at a time because there are delicate negotiations taking place right now and we can’t have two voices coming out of the United States when you have so much at stake,” Obama told reporters.

The toll in the Mideast continued to rise. More than 500 Palestinians have reportedly been killed — a quarter of whom are believed by the United Nations to be civilians — and at least 2,200 wounded. Five Israelis, including one soldier, have been killed.

Israel has repeatedly made three demands for ending its current campaign: It wants an end to the rocket attacks, some form of outside supervision of Hamas’ role in any cease-fire and a halt to any restocking of the group’s arsenal.

Israel has not called for an end of Hamas’ control of Gaza, though the invasion has raised questions about who will patrol the region, which was once controlled by Israel.

The heaviest fighting in Gaza was in the populated areas in the outskirts of Jebaliya. Dozens have been arrested, Israeli officials said

Military sources said that the first stage of the ground operation has progressed relatively smoothly with a relatively low level of Hamas resistance. However, that could change as Israeli forces move into the more populated areas and face greater threats.

Maj. Avital Leibovich, an Israeli military spokeswoman, said Hamas was to blame for civilian casualties because it operates in densely populated areas.

“Civilians will probably continue to get killed, unfortunately, because Hamas put them in the first lines of fire,” she said.

The bloodshed has spurred street protests around the world and brought diplomatic pressure on Israel to hold its fire.

Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg, heading a European Union peace mission, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy met separately with Israeli officials in Jerusalem to press for an immediate cease-fire by both sides.

“The guns must fall silent,” Sarkozy said. “There must be a humanitarian truce.”

Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni rejected the appeals, saying the military needed more time to subdue Hamas.

“We are not asking the world to take part in the battle; we are only asking to be allowed to carry it out ourselves until we reach a point in which we decide our goals have been met,” she said at a joint press conference with Schwarzenberg.

Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev said the offensive has three objectives: to “substantially destroy” Hamas’ military apparatus, break its will to fire more rockets, and bring about a new security arrangement with Egypt to prevent Hamas from bringing weapons into Gaza through the smuggling tunnels under the border.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack outlined a cease-fire proposal being promoted by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that appeared to address Israel’s conditions. He said she had discussed it by phone over the weekend with 17 foreign leaders in Europe and the Middle East.

Rice’s proposal calls for a halt to Hamas’ rocket attacks and an arrangement to deal with the tunnels. It also addresses Hamas’ main demand — ending an Israeli blockade of Gaza — by proposing a reopening of crossing points on the Israel-Gaza border.

Regev said Israeli leaders had been in contact with Rice and with Egyptian officials, but he declined to comment on her proposal. He emphasized that Israel welcomed international help to resolve the conflict, but only on Israel’s timetable.

“A cease-fire right now would be a band-aid solution,” he said. “Gaza would explode in our faces a week from now or a month from now.”

The Bush administration has accepted that argument. President Bush said Monday that the violence must be stopped, “but not at the expense of an agreement that does not prevent the crisis from happening again.”

In Damascus, Syria, a senior Hamas official rejected the U.S. proposal, the Associated Press reported. It quoted Moussa Abu Marzouk as saying the plan seeks to impose “a de facto situation” on Gaza by military force.

But the group sent a delegation to Cairo on Monday to discuss the conflict with Egyptian officials.

Israel seizes high-rises, attacks tunnels in Gaza – Los Angeles Times

The campaign may succeed, experts here and in Israel say, but it could also backfire. Either way, the political consequences could reverberate throughout the Middle East, all the way to Iran, and help determine the ability of President-elect Barack Obama to pursue his stated goals of calming the Middle East through diplomacy.

While Israeli leadership was not stating wider goals, there was clearly hope in the country — as tanks and troops massed late in the week — that the assault in Gaza would do more than just stop the rocket fire with which Hamas had broken a cease-fire last month. The larger hope was that subduing Hamas would delegitimize the group’s leadership in the eyes of the Palestinian people and eliminate its power to prevent a two-state solution. Already last week, it was exposing political, ethnic and sectarian divisions in the region that Israel, like the United States, had long sought to exploit.

In a highly optimistic scenario for Israel and the United States, a clear victory for Israel would make it easier for Egypt, Jordan and countries farther afield to declare common cause against Islamic militancy and its main sponsor in the region, Iran.

Then, as Martin S. Indyk, a former American ambassador to Israel, argued, an international peacekeeping force made up of Turkish and Arab troops could clear the way for a restoration of political control in Gaza by President Mahmoud Abbas, who heads the Fatah movement and is titular president of all Palestinians, but in reality is the weak leader of only the West Bank.

A two-state treaty could follow, and then perhaps peace between Israel and Syria, leaving Iran isolated behind the buffer of a newly democratic and peaceful, if not particularly friendly, Iraq.

Iran is the one country — aside from Israel — with the most at stake in the outcome. It sponsors Hamas and Hezbollah not only to torment Israel but also to spread its influence in the Arab world. A convincing defeat of Hamas would undercut that strategy, and presumably Iran’s ability to resist Western pressure in any broad bargaining — for example, over its support for terrorist groups and even its nuclear program. “It’s an ambitious scenario,” said Mr. Indyk, with a sobering caveat, “that would require things to get significantly worse before they could get better.”

But Israel’s attacks also could fail outright, and history suggests that as the more likely scenario, Middle East experts across the political spectrum said.

The strikes — and the Arab anger over scenes of death and destruction — have highlighted divisions in the Middle East that can prevent Arab nations from working with Israel.

Of course, Egypt, whose peace treaty with Israel is anathema to militants in the Middle East, kept its border to Gaza largely shut last week, and its president, Hosni Mubarak, quarreled openly with the leader of Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant Shiite group that now shares power in Lebanon. And at a meeting of the Arab League, Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister gently and indirectly rebuked Hamas for provoking the conflict. Those actions were in line with Israeli dreams. But the attacks also subjected the regimes in Egypt and other moderate Arab nations to blistering scorn from inflamed Arab populations.

And that widened the rifts between rulers and citizens in countries nominally allied with the United States and willing to deal with Israel. The longer this goes on, the more likely it is that regional tensions will intensify. The images of carnage could fuel new hatreds and radicalize some who felt that peace talks offer more hope than resistance.

In some ways, the Gaza attacks were reminiscent of the gamble Israel took, and largely lost, in Lebanon in 1982. It invaded to eliminate the threat of Yasir Arafat’s forces, which were then encamped on its northern border. It accomplished that goal, driving Mr. Arafat into exile in Tunis, and eventually he recognized Israel and negotiated. But in the meantime, a new and virulently anti-Israel threat was born in Lebanon in the form of Hezbollah. Israel’s northern border remained insecure, and Iran’s influence grew.

Now Mr. Abbas, already deeply mired in a rivalry with Hamas, could find himself further isolated from Palestinian sentiment the longer the Israeli assaults continue. Signs were growing last week that the fighting was emboldening Palestinian resistance, prompting Mr. Abbas to say he was prepared to walk away from the peace process President Bush began in Annapolis, Md., in 2007.

“What does he have to offer us a year after Annapolis?” Mustafa Barghouti, a doctor, independent Palestinian legislator and advocate of democracy, said of Mr. Abbas, in a telephone conversation from the West Bank. “They promised us an agreement by the end of the year. What do we have after this year?”

Dr. Barghouti, who was a minister in the short-lived unity government that followed Hamas’s victory in 2006 elections, said the only durable solution was an accommodation that included Hamas. “There are two ways to deal with Hamas,” he said. “Either confront them, which makes them more extreme, or accept them in the political process.”

That would hearten Islamic militants in Egypt and Jordan and make those countries’ leaders shiver a bit more; and it would very likely embolden Iran in its ambitions for regional leadership and insistence on a nuclear program.

Most analysts expect that some sort of negotiated cease-fire with Hamas is inevitable, since Israel seems neither willing nor able to reoccupy Gaza and replace its leadership. That, then, would leave the group with many followers in Gaza, even if its ranks are badly battered, its leaders driven underground and its formal centers of power, through which it might deliver services to its people, are destroyed by Israeli bombs. “Hamas as an institution is not really sustaining casualties,” said Ziad Asali, president of the American Task Force for Palestine. “The people of Gaza are the ones who are paying the price.”

Daniel Levy, an Israeli analyst with the New America Foundation here, said the flaw in the Israeli strategy is the belief that that people in Gaza will blame their own government, and not the Israelis, for the new wave of violence.

Israel, for its part, is determined to avoid the military and political catastrophe of its incursion in Lebanon in 2006 to squelch cross-border rocket attacks by Hezbollah not all that different from the ones by Hamas. That fight ended with a United Nations resolution and international peacekeepers but also, eventually, a rearmed Hezbollah.

“Israel believes its deterrence was lost in that war,” David Makovsky, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, wrote on Wednesday, “and Israel’s current campaign against Hamas should be seen as an effort to regain that deterrence.”

One lesson Israel learned from Lebanon, he argued, was to lower expectations, depriving Hamas of the chance to declare victory simply by surviving the Israeli assault, as Hezbollah did. Israel has done that by remaining vague about its final goals. Israel also seems to have prepared better; by all appearances its forces were following a methodical campaign of strikes, even as it tried to win the propaganda war — or at least to do less badly this time, by trying to minimize civilian casualties.

Almost everyone in Washington agrees that the timing of the latest crisis had at least one benefit: It came before the inauguration of Mr. Obama on Jan. 20. Although he has expressed staunch support for Israel — at one point justifying a response to Hamas rocket attacks — he has raised expectations of a change in policy in the Middle East. The fighting has certainly pushed the Arab-Israeli conflict back to the front of a United States agenda crowded with foreign crises, from Iran to India to North Korea.

It is likely that the immediate fighting will have ended by Inauguration Day. If so, President Obama will be able to capitalize on the cease-fire to renew a push for a permanent settlement. He once suggested throwing American weight behind regional talks that would include Hamas, but that may no longer be a possibility. Mr. Bush fiercely resisted any accommodation with a group the United States and European Union classify as a terrorist organization.

“He has one advantage: that this is happening now,” said Mr. Asali of the American Task Force for Palestine. “The passionate reactions, the emotional reactions, the hatred, et cetera, et cetera, will be directed at the present administration rather than the next one. But that is a slight silver lining.”

The New Meaning of an Old Battle in the Mideast – NYTimes.com

The fall of Kilinochchi on Friday dealt a devastating blow to the insurgents’ 25-year campaign to create an independent state for ethnic minority Tamils. It has squeezed them into 620 square miles (1,605 square kilometers) they still hold in the northeast.

Rebel-affiliated TamilNet Web site said the Tamil Tigers had moved their headquarters before the town fell.

Air force spokesman Janaka Nanayakkara said that helicopters bombed the rebels near Oddusuddan and Mullaitivu towns Saturday in the northeast as the insurgents tried to stop advancing government troops.

He said casualty details from the raids were unavailable. Rebel officials could not be contacted for comment.

The military said in a statement that the air force also bombed rebel targets Friday to assist troops trying to reach a remaining rebel stronghold at Elephant Pass in the north.

Army Commander Lt. Gen. Sarath Fonseka said that his soldiers are just 1 mile (2 kilometers) south of Elephant Pass, a strategic gateway to the northern Jaffna peninsula, the cultural capital of the country’s Tamils.

Sri Lanka’s army maintained a well-fortified base at the pass until the rebels captured it eight years ago killing hundreds of soldiers.

Army troops cleared the way into Kilinochchi on Thursday when they captured a key crossroad north of the town that allowed them to close in from three directions, the military said. They entered Kilinochchi the following morning with only minimal resistance, they said.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa, who has vowed to destroy the group formally known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, announced the fall of Kilinochchi in a nationally televised speech.

“Our brave and heroic troops have fully captured Kilinochchi, which was considered the main bastion of the LTTE,” he said. “For the last time, I call upon the LTTE to lay down their arms and surrender.”

Just an hour after the announcement, a suspected rebel suicide attacker blew himself up near air force headquarters in the heart of Colombo among troops heading home in the busy afternoon rush hour, air force spokesman Wing Commander Janaka Nanayakkara said. Among the 37 injured were 16 airmen, he said.

The rebels have been fighting since 1983 to create an independent homeland for the minority Tamils, who have suffered decades of marginalization by successive governments controlled by the Sinhalese majority. The conflict has killed more than 70,000 people.

Yahoo! News

There were tentative signs that the current phase of fighting may be nearing an end. Most of the airstrikes targeted empty buildings and abandoned sites, suggesting Israel may be running out of targets.

Ground troops massed on the border, waiting for a signal to invade Gaza, but international cease-fire efforts were also gaining momentum.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy is visiting the region next week, and President George W. Bush and U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon both spoke in favor of an internationally monitored truce.

Israel launched the offensive on Dec. 27 in response to intensifying rocket fire by Hamas militants in Gaza. The operation has killed more than 430 Palestinians, including dozens of civilians, according to Palestinian and U.N. counts. Four Israelis have also been killed, and rocket attacks on southern Israel persist.

In the latest attacks, the Israeli army struck the homes of two Hamas operatives, saying the buildings were used to store weapons and plan attacks. Hamas outposts, training camps and rocket launching sites also were targeted, it said.

Early Saturday, it dropped leaflets in downtown Gaza City ordering people off the streets.

Later in the day, several airstrikes struck the city, killing a night watchman at a Gaza City school. Four people, including a midlevel Hamas commander, died of wounds sustained earlier, Gaza health officials said.

Palestinian militants fired three rockets into southern Israel, causing no injuries.

The Israeli airstrikes have badly damaged Gaza’s infrastructure, knocking out power and water in many areas and raising concerns of a looming humanitarian disaster.

Israel briefly opened its border Friday to allow nearly 300 Palestinians with foreign passports to flee the besieged area. The evacuees told of crippling shortages of water, electricity and medicine.

Maxwell Gaylard, U.N. humanitarian coordinator for the Palestinians Territories, said some 2,000 people have been wounded in the past week and a “significant number” of the dead were women and children. “There is a critical emergency right now in the Gaza Strip,” he said.

Israel denies there is a humanitarian crisis in Gaza and has increased its shipments of goods into Gaza. It says it has confined its attacks to militants while trying to prevent civilian casualties.

While ground troops remained poised to enter Gaza, Israel also has left the door open to a diplomatic solution, saying it would accept a cease-fire if it is enforced by international monitors.

This latest round of violence erupted after the expiration of a six-month cease-fire that was repeatedly marred by sporadic rocket attacks on Israel.

A call for international monitors appeared to be gaining steam.

At the United Nations, Ban urged world leaders to intensify efforts to achieve an immediate cease-fire that includes monitors to enforce the truce and possibly protect Palestinian civilians.

In Washington, Bush on Friday branded the rocket fire an “act of terror” and outlined his own condition for a cease-fire in Gaza, saying no peace deal would be acceptable without monitoring to halt the flow of smuggled weapons to terrorist groups.

“The United States is leading diplomatic efforts to achieve a meaningful cease-fire that is fully respected,” Bush said in his weekly radio address.

But with time running out on the Bush presidency, the crisis in Gaza is likely to carry over to President-elect Barack Obama. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice continued telephone diplomacy to arrange a truce, but said she had no plans to make an emergency visit to the region.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and several Arab foreign ministers were flying to New York over the weekend to urge the U.N. Security Council to adopt an Arab draft resolution that would condemn Israel and demand a halt to its bombing campaign in Gaza.

Abbas, whose forces in Gaza were ousted by Hamas in June 2007, still claims authority over the area.

The council is expected to discuss the draft resolution on Monday. But the United States said the draft is “unacceptable” and “unbalanced” because it makes no mention of halting the Hamas rocket attacks.

Israel blasts Hamas targets, diplomacy gains steam – Yahoo! News

Nizar Rayan, 49, a Hamas hardliner who was close to the group’s military wing, was one of the few senior figures in the movement not to go underground when the latest conflict began. The four-storey building where he had his apartment in the Jabalia refugee camp was destroyed and neighbouring buildings badly damaged.

Large crowds pawed through the rubble looking for survivors. As well as Rayan, 11 people, including two of his four wives and four of his 12 children, were killed.

“We are trying to hit everybody who is a leader of the organisation, and today we hit one of their leaders,” said Israeli vice-prime minister Haim Ramon.

Israeli television broadcast archive footage of Rayan in military fatigues and carrying a Kalashnikov rifle and RPG launcher. He was a former member of the Hamas political bureau and a religious scholar who lectured in sharia law at the Islamic University in Gaza. In 2001 he dispatched one of his sons on a suicide mission that killed two Israeli settlers in Gaza.

In February 2007, shortly after Hamas and its rival Fatah agreed to form a united Palestinian government, Rayan insisted the Islamist movement would never accept Israel: “There is nothing called Israel, neither in reality nor in the imagination.” He had also called for a return to suicide bombing in Israel.

Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza has killed more than 400 Palestinians and left hundreds injured. Sites bombed yesterday included the justice ministry and the parliament building in Gaza City, more smuggling tunnels on the Egyptian border, and the houses in northern Gaza of three other militants from Hamas and another group, the Popular Resistance Committees.

Palestinian militants in Gaza fired about 20 rockets into southern Israel, but there were no casualties. Four Israelis have been killed since Saturday.

Israeli troops, tanks and armoured vehicles are still in position along the Gaza border, ready for a land invasion. Although a poll in Ha’aretz newspaper showed 52% of Israelis support the bombing of Gaza, it found that as few as 19% backed a land invasion. Only 20% wanted a ceasefire.

The prime minister, Ehud Olmert, travelled to Be’er Sheva, a city in the Negev hit by Palestinian rockets for the first time this week, but gave no hint as to whether a ground operation was imminent. “I very much hope that we will succeed in reaching our goals as quickly as possible,” he said. “We have not declared war on the residents of Gaza. I reiterate that we will treat the population with silk gloves but will apply an iron fist to Hamas.” Despite his words, there is concern about civilian casualties, believed to number at least 60, as well as the humanitarian crisis. The UN only yesterday resumed its food handouts, which help feed about 750,000 Palestinians – half the population of the strip.

Ten Israeli human rights groups called on the defence ministry to resume the supply of industrial diesel to Gaza, halted since Saturday. With no deliveries of diesel, Gaza’s sole power plant has been shut since Monday.

Gisha, one of the human rights groups, said the main Shifa hospital in Gaza City was suffering 20 hours of blackouts a day and relied on its generators. Although Gaza also receives electricity directly from Israel and Egypt, the shortages due to the power plant shutdown have affected water pumps: 60% of the population receives clean water on average just once every five to seven days, Gisha said. Some have been without water for 10 days.

“Gaza’s electricity system is at the point of collapse, just when electricity is most needed to operate hospitals, water wells and additional infrastructure,” the rights groups said in their letter. They said the Israeli military was responsible for the needs of the civilian population of Gaza, including fuel and electricity.

Israel’s foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, who flew to Paris for meetings with French officials, dismissed calls for a humanitarian ceasefire. “There is no humanitarian crisis in the strip, and therefore there is no need for a humanitarian truce,” she said.

For the past three days Israel has allowed about 100 truckloads of humanitarian supplies into Gaza. However, during the six-month ceasefire in the second half of last year less than this was arriving each day, meaning stocks were very low. The average daily rate was 150 trucks throughout 2005, before Hamas won the Palestinian elections, and even that only covered immediate needs.

All exports have been banned for 18 months, contrary to an agreement signed by Israel and negotiated by the US in November 2005 which said 400 truckloads a day of exports should have been leaving Gaza by the end of 2006.

As international pressure mounts for an end to the fighting, Israeli officials have suggested one of their conditions will be international monitoring of a ceasefire.

In a sign of growing concern that Britain should do more to distance itself from Israeli action, 53 Labour MPs, peers and assembly members have signed a letter to the foreign secretary, David Miliband, calling on the government to condemn the excessive force being used by Israel.

The letter praises Miliband for calling for an immediate ceasefire, but says the conflict in Gaza has to be seen in the context of the continuing expansion of settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Israeli bomb kills Hamas leader and six of his family | World news | The Guardian

The targets included command posts of the Islamic militant movement, some 130 missile launch sites, munitions dumps and individuals who appeared to be carrying weapons. Also among them was a Hamas center, the Islamic University, which the officer described as a weapons research facility.

He said 95 percent of the targets were hit, and no major targets remained standing.

Now the objective is to hunt down missile launchers and fighters one-by-one, said the officer, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with military regulations.

Describing a typical mission, the officer said it often begins when spy planes identify trucks or fighters transporting what could be a missile launcher.

Information on the target is fed into the command center, where a commander clears the mission. The data is relayed to the weapons system on board an F16 jet fighter, which plots the target. The pilot flies into position, and the bomb is released automatically, guided by laser beam onto the missile launcher.

“Just like a GPS telling you exactly where you are, we know exactly where the target is,” he said.

As the officer outlined the precision bombing, the reach of Israeli intelligence became apparent.

Seeking to avoid civilian casualties, he said, an automated telephone service dials the phones of residents of a targeted building, warning them to evacuate. He shrugged when asked how Israel obtained the numbers.

Since the air strikes began Saturday, most of the nearly 400 casualties have been Hamas fighters or officials, but dozens of civilians also have been killed.

The Associated Press: Israelis detail combat sorties over Gaza