1:00 pm - By PHIL REEVES
GAZA - More than 12 hours after Israeli jets roared in to flatten security headquarters in Gaza and the West Bank to avenge the Palestinians' first major guerrilla infiltration into an Israeli army base, not a whisper of complaint had emerged from the international community.
Only three months of the Middle East's "summer of hate" have been needed for Israel's use of American-made F-16 and F-15 warplanes to bomb the Palestinians to be seen as a routine military tactic.
When Ariel Sharon, Israel's Prime Minister, first used F-16s in May, killing a dozen Palestinians in the West Bank in answer to a suicide bombing, there was an outcry; it was the first attack by warplanes on the Palestinians of the occupied territories since the 1967 war.
Israel's army held off from using them again for weeks afterwards. But yesterday - the third such strike - the world shrugged it off.
By this morning (NZT), there had been no significant criticism, no protest that this was another example of excessive force.
Israel was focused on the incidents that prompted the bombing raids an attack on Saturday by two Palestinian guerrillas from the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who managed to infiltrate a heavily fortified army base in a hillock in southern Gaza and killed three soldiers, including a major.
Israel's army commanders have been highly embarrassed by the assault, which is the first of its kind during the 11-month intifada, and have launched an inquiry.
Later, two more Jewish settlers a married couple were killed in a West Bank ambush.
The F-16's laser-guided missiles used in the strikes are designed to bring down buildings like playing cards. Most of the main headquarters of the Palestinian police in Gaza City, a large complex that once housed hundreds of men, was turned into a heap of dust and broken concrete.
One half of the four-storey building came crashing down; a third of a nearby administrative building was similarly destroyed.
The scene was the same 16km down the road, close to the Jewish settlement of Kfar Darom. A base belonging to Palestinian military intelligence, but evacuated three months ago, lay in a pile, adorned only with a tattered Palestinian flag that continued to fly from a flagpole above a sign showing the unit's insignia.
There is no comparison between these ruins and those buildings hit by missiles fired from helicopters, Israel's most frequent form of aerial attack in the occupied territories. The latter are usually intact, but punctured by a large hole. The former look as if they have been brought tumbling down by an enormous earthquake.
And that is the crucial point. The F-16 strikes hit buildings belonging to Yasser Arafat's security apparatus, which the Israelis knew were likely to be empty. The weapons accurately found their targets. A handful of people were injured but no one was killed although a man died in Rafa, southern Gaza, in a separate Israeli demolition raid on the ground.
The air raid was clinically executed, and almost ritualistic punishment, designed to intimidate the Palestinians by providing them with another example of Israel's massive military superiority. But this is an incredibly dangerous game. It is all too easy to imagine an F-16 hitting not a police station, but an apartment block crammed as they usually are in the grotesquely overcrowded Gaza with families.
A massacre would ratchet up the conflict to a terrible new level. The United States has played an important role in creating the conditions in which it is now possible for Israel to deploy F-16s without incurring an international backlash.
The message that has been emanating from George Bush, the US president, while on holiday is that he does not want to get involved in a conflict that can only lose him votes, and that he will not complain if Israel toughens its methods further.
Gaza was not the only place in the cross-hairs of the F-16 bombers yesterday.
The Israelis also flattened a police station in Salfit, a Palestinian town south of the Ariel corridor a finger of occupied land in the northern West Bank that has been steadily populated with settlers.
- INDEPENDENT
Feature: Middle East
Map
UN: Information on the Question of Palestine
Israel's Permanent Mission to the UN
Palestine's Permanent Observer Mission to the UN
Middle East Daily
Arabic News
Arabic Media Internet Network
Jerusalem Post
Israel Wire
US Department of State - Middle East Peace Process
1:00 pm - By PHIL REEVES
GAZA - More than 12 hours after Israeli jets roared in to flatten security headquarters in Gaza and the West Bank to avenge the Palestinians' first major guerrilla infiltration into an Israeli army base, not a whisper of complaint had emerged from the international community.
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