Gaza deaths prompt threats

Leaders of the ruling Hamas party called Wednesday for renewed attacks inside Israel after Israeli artillery shells tore into a residential neighborhood here, killing 18 civilians, including five women and eight children.

Angry demonstrations erupted across the Gaza Strip after the killings, the highest civilian death toll on either side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in more than three years. Thousands of Palestinians burned tires and demanded revenge, chanting “Death to Israel! Death to America!”

The predawn shelling and its aftermath marked a potentially perilous turn in the long-stalemated conflict and raised new risks for the United States, as Hamas’ military wing called for striking American targets as well.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert voiced sorrow over the incident, in which some victims died in their beds and others perished as they fled into the street. Defense Minister Amir Peretz ordered a halt to shelling in Gaza, where the army had been targeting Palestinian fighters in a week-old offensive, until an investigation of the incident concludes.

A White House statement said the United States was “deeply saddened by the injuries and loss of life,” and called on all parties to “act with care and restraint so as to avoid any harm to innocent civilians.”

An Israeli army spokesman said artillery guns were aimed at a site from which a Palestinian cell had launched four crude rockets known as Kassams into the Israeli city of Ashkelon, seven miles away. Israeli television said investigators were looking into a possible flaw in the system that guided the Israeli shells.

Seven shells landed on Hamad Street here in this northern Gaza town, far from their apparent target, blowing large holes in three apartment buildings. Thirteen of the dead were members of the extended Athamna family, which occupied one of the buildings.

As weeping neighbors gathered on the shattered block and children combed the rubble for shrapnel, witnesses described a scene of desperation and panic after the 5:15 a.m. shelling, which blew some of the victims to pieces.

“We saw smoke coming out of one building and ran inside with a stretcher,” said ambulance driver Yousri Almasri, who along with a medic had been the first outsider to reach the scene. “We found ourselves walking in blood and stepping over pieces of bodies.”

Ambulances loaded as many as four victims at a time, he said, in some case heaping the dead over the wounded being rushed to Kamal Adwan Hospital in nearby Beit Lahiya.

Riddled with shrapnel wounds, Asma Athamna, 14, recalled scrambling into a narrow alley outside her home with other family members, only to see her mother and older sister cut down.

“We were afraid of death inside the house, but death took my mother and sister outside,” she told reporters from her hospital bed.

In another bed, Saad Athamna, 52, screamed, “I want to die! I want to die! I lost everything.” Hospital officials said his 80-year-old mother, his wife and five of their children, 4 to 14 years old, were killed.

Khaled Mashaal, the Hamas political boss based in Syria, declared an end to the militant Islamic movement’s unilateral truce with Israel. His call Wednesday for “a roaring reaction” to avenge the Beit Hanoun killings was echoed by Nizar Rayan and other Hamas leaders in Gaza.

“Our martyrs are going to sacrifice their lives in the depths of our occupied land,” Rayan told a large, agitated crowed outside the hospital in Beit Lahiya. “They will strike in Jaffa, in Haifa, inside Ashdod,” he added, naming Israeli cities.

Although Hamas’ military wing launches Kassam rockets from Gaza almost daily, unimpeded by the Hamas government, there has been no known attack by the movement on Israeli soil since August 2005.

In a separate threat, Hamas’ military wing said it held the United States, as Israel’s ally, partly responsible for the killings in Beit Hanoun and urged Muslims around the world “to teach the American enemy tough lessons.” Ghazi Hamad, a spokesman for the Palestinian government, said the movement had no intention of attacking American targets.

Israeli officials say suicide attacks are a constant threat, contained more by rigid Israeli security measures than by Palestinian restraint. Israel has arrested two would-be suicide bombers in the West Bank and one in the Gaza Strip in the last two weeks.

Israel’s army has been drawn increasingly into Gaza, before and since the inconclusive end of its summer war against Hezbollah militias in southern Lebanon. Israel says the rocket attacks from Gaza are unprovoked, because the government withdrew its settlers and military outposts from the coastal territory last year.

The army began periodic incursions into Gaza in June to root out rocket-launching cells, halt weapons smuggling from Egypt and search for one of its captured soldiers.

The shelling Wednesday brought the death toll in the heaviest week of fighting to 47 Palestinian fighters, 33 civilians and one Israeli soldier.

“This is a shocking tragedy,” Yossi Beilin, a leftist member of the Israeli parliament, said of Wednesday’s killings. “The moral and diplomatic price Israel will pay for this operation far exceeds any achievement.”

Hamas’ militant reaction undermined two efforts by moderate Palestinians to overcome a Western aid cutoff to the Palestinian Authority. A Palestinian diplomatic mission had been touring Europe this week to argue that aid, halted when Hamas came to power this spring without dropping its refusal to recognize Israel, should be restored because Hamas intended to refrain from attacking the Jewish state.

Citing a three-day mourning period for the victims, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, a senior Hamas leader, suspended talks on a proposal by President Mahmoud Abbas, of the rival Fatah party, to appoint a “unity” government led by a nonpartisan prime minister more palatable to the West.

The killings also brought a temporary halt to criticism of Hamas by its rivals.

“Yes, there is a serious problem with Kassam rockets,” Sufian abu Zaida, a senior Fatah activist, said in an interview with Israel Radio. “But when I see the massacre that occurred in Beit Hanoun, I will speak no criticism [of Hamas]. When children are killed in their sleep, this is a massacre.”

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boudreaux@latimes.com

Times staff writer Boudreaux reported from Jerusalem and special correspondent Alouf from Beit Hanoun.