Hamas fires second rocket into major Israeli city

An Israeli attack in the northern Gaza Strip killed a Hamas gunman and six Palestinian policemen. Picture / Reuters

GAZA - Hamas militants in Gaza have fired a missile into the Israeli city of Ashkelon for a second consecutive day, hours after the Jewish state vowed to step up a military offensive in response to the first attack.

The Israeli army said the rocket hit an orchard in the coastal city - 12 km inside Israeli territory. The missile fired a day before struck a schoolyard. No one was injured in either attack.

Meanwhile, a Hamas gunman and a Palestinian policeman were killed and six other people were wounded by Israeli shelling and an air strike in the northern Gaza Strip, hospital staff said.

The Palestinian rocket attacks on Ashkelon have stirred Israeli pledges of harsh reprisals against the governing Hamas movement, which is already feeling the heat over the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier.

Hamas militants were among three factions from Gaza who seized Corporal Gilad Shalit in a cross-border raid on June 25.

"Given the abduction and continued ballistic salvoes ... the rules of the game in dealing with the Palestinian Authority and Hamas must be changed," said a statement issued by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office before the latest rocket attack.

Witnesses said several Israeli tanks had pushed into northern Gaza to the site of the former Jewish settlement of Elei Sinai, from where the first rocket was fired at Ashkelon.

Political sources said Israel had effectively decided to carve out a buffer zone in northern Gaza to halt the attacks.

A spokesman for Olmert said no decision had been made that would amount to Israel re-occupying parts of the Gaza Strip, which it quit last year after 38 years of occupation.

Israeli military spokesmen denied tanks had moved into former Gaza settlement sites, saying troops were searching nearby for explosives and tunnels while some armoured vehicles were near the Gaza border to protect troops.

The statement from Olmert's office said his security cabinet had approved strikes against Hamas militants in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, as well as approving stepped up attacks on rocket-firing militants in Gaza.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in Washington it was "high time" Hamas released Shalit, a 19-year-old tank gunner.

One Palestinian source close to negotiations with Egyptian mediators said the militants were ready to release Shalit if Israel set a timetable for freeing some prisoners. Israel has rejected any negotiations or prisoner swap.

In Damascus, exiled Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal told a visiting Turkish official the group favoured a deal to end the crisis and was ready to show flexibility, but only if Israel agreed a prisoner swap, political sources said.

The Israeli army swept into southern Gaza last week in a bid to free the soldier.

Israel has detained eight Hamas cabinet members and nearly two dozen legislators in the West Bank. It has also bombed Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh's office and other targets from the air.

The Jewish state has hinted it could assassinate leaders of Hamas, whose government is under an international aid embargo, unless Shalit was freed.

But Israeli leaders sought to play down concerns the army would stay in Gaza.

"We will not re-occupy Gaza, but we will strike everyone linked to terror using all means at our disposal," Justice Minister Haim Ramon said on Israel Radio.

There has been little information about Shalit since he was captured. Ramon said only that Israel believed "Gilad is alive."

- REUTERS