Rocket strikes next to Israeli day-care center

A rocket fired from the Gaza Strip exploded Monday next to a day-care center in the Israeli border town of Sderot, an attack that Palestinian militants called retribution for the deaths of three Gaza children in an Israeli airstrike last week.

None of the 15 children at the center was injured. But frantic parents, angry over the government’s inability to protect Sderot from near-daily rocket fire, pulled the town’s 2,500 schoolchildren out of classes and vowed to keep them home until they got fortified classrooms or were transferred.

Signaling an escalation of the conflict, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said the army had been instructed to “destroy every rocket launcher and to strike all those involved in the fire.”

“We will not limit ourselves,” he said at a news conference in Jerusalem.

Israel carries out frequent ground and air attacks against Gaza-based militants who have launched thousands of crude Kassam rockets across the border since 2001. But it has been unable to stop the rockets, which have killed at least 12 Israelis in the last six years, or protect the 22,000 people of Sderot, the only sizable Israeli community within the weapon’s 6-mile range.

The army said seven rockets, some fired from as close as a mile away, fell in or near Sderot on Monday. The militant group Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the barrage, calling it “a gift to the Israelis for the new school year” and retaliation for “crimes against Palestinian children.”

Three Palestinian cousins, ages 10 to 12, were killed Wednesday in an airstrike on one of Islamic Jihad’s rocket launch sites near the border. The Israeli army initially said it fired at three figures thought to be retrieving the launcher and realized too late that they were children. After an inquiry, the army acknowledged that the cousins had been playing tag.

By the weekend, the army said it had identified the Islamic Jihad cell responsible for recent rocket fire. But a missile launched from an Israeli air force plane Sunday missed the vehicle in which the militants were traveling.

Gaza is ruled by Hamas, an Islamic militant movement that refuses to renounce violence against Israel. It has done little to stop Islamic Jihad and other groups from firing rockets.

Sunday was the first day of Israel’s academic year. Anticipating that Sderot would be targeted, the army dispatched more than 200 soldiers to escort students between home and school and to instruct them on emergency procedures.

Sderot has an alarm system to warn of rockets, but residents often have no more than 20 seconds to reach one of the town’s many concrete shelters. On Monday, just 12 seconds elapsed between the alarm and the rocket’s explosion in a courtyard next to the unprotected day-care center, according to footage aired on Israel’s Channel 10 news.

The building sustained no structural damage. News footage showed toddlers screaming in playpens or crawling hurriedly across the floor, some with pacifiers in their mouths. All appeared to be younger than 2.

“The children were helpless; the caretakers were hysterical,” paramedic Avi Teiger told Israel Radio, describing the scene before soldiers and mothers arrived to whisk the toddlers away.

The rocket landed as the school day was starting. By midmorning the schools were all but empty. “The school year is over,” said Batya Katar, head of the Sderot Parents Assn. “We cannot hold on anymore.”

In May, the parents group won a Supreme Court decision requiring the government to reinforce all classrooms with concrete or steel-plated walls and roof coverings by summer’s end. The government’s policy had been to fortify only first-, second- and third-grade classrooms and to count on children in grades four to 12 to get into shelters.

In July, Olmert’s office promised to build new, rocket-resistant schools instead of fortifying existing ones. It asked the court last week to extend the end-of-summer deadline.

After Monday’s attack, leaders of the parents group said they would insist on keeping the schools shut until the government complied with the ruling.

Olmert’s critics demanded that Israel launch a wider ground offensive in Gaza, a territory from which the army withdrew its bases two years ago and has been reluctant to reoccupy.

“The problem is not fortifications; it’s terror,” Sderot Mayor Eli Moyal told Israel Radio. “For seven years the state hasn’t dealt with terror. So we fortify all the schools. What about the other places? Are we safe in our cars? In the streets? The cafes? The playgrounds?

“To stop the Kassams, an operation is needed of the sort that even the most extreme right-wingers may not approve.”

boudreaux@latimes.com