JERUSALEM — Palestinian militants fired rockets for the first time at Jerusalem on Friday in a daring new escalation of hostilities with Israel on the third day of their latest lethal conflict over the Gaza Strip. The attack triggered air-raid sirens and panicked residents, who had thought themselves secure from such attacks because of the holy city’s multireligious heritage and large Palestinian population.
Israeli authorities did not immediately confirm the origin of the rocket fire, but it was assumed that the source was Gaza, where the Palestinian militant group Hamas and its radical affiliates have amassed arsenals of smuggled rockets with increased ranges and more accurate trajectories in re-cent years.
On Thursday, they launched at least two at Tel Aviv, Israel’s biggest city, for the first time, and Friday they launched more as part of a response to a large scale aerial assault by the Israelis on targets in Gaza and indications that Israel was close to initiating its first ground invasion there in four years.
“We are sending a short and simple message: There is no security for any Zionist or any single inch of Palestine and we plan more surprises,” said Abu Obeida, a spokesman for the military wing of Hamas, in a message quoted by The Associated Press.
Today, Israel expanded its fierce air assault on rocket operations in the Gaza Strip, striking Hamas government and security compounds, smuggling tunnels and electricity sources.
Jerusalem, a city holy to Jews, Muslims and Christians, had been previously thought off-limits to rocket attacks by militant Palestinians and others who reject Israel’s claim to the city as its capital. Even Saddam Hussein, the then-Iraqi leader, had avoided targeting the city when he aimed Scud missiles at Israel during the Persian Gulf War in 1991. The city is about 48 miles from the Gaza border.
The police in Jerusalem said no rockets fell within city limits, but one crashed harmlessly near a Jewish West Bank settlement just south of Jerusalem. A police spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld, said other explosions were heard in the same area but security forces had not located the impact sites.
The Jerusalem rocket attack came hours after scores of rockets were fired from Gaza into Israel, striking major cities of the south, causing widespread panic and damage and shattering plans for a temporary cease-fire during a visit to Gaza by the Egyptian prime minister that showed the shifting dynamics of Middle East politics since the turmoil of the Arab Spring uprisings.
Despite three days of repeated Israeli aerial assaults on suspected stockpiles of rockets in Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces said more than 100 were fired into Israel on Friday, apparently including Iranian-made Fajr-5 projectiles that Israeli officials say are the only ones in the Hamas arsenal with a range that can reach Tel Aviv or Jerusalem.
Hamas contended that it had produced those rockets, which the group called M75s, referring to a range of 75 kilometers or roughly 47 miles. Israeli munitions experts said they had never heard of that weapon.
After a meeting with President Shimon Peres, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the Israeli army was “continuing to hit Hamas hard and is ready to expand the operation into Gaza,” according to a statement from his office.
Netanyahu said that the aim was “to take out the terrorist infrastructure in Gaza while doing everything possible not to harm civilians.” He added that “Israel must continue to hit hard the missiles which are intended for central and southern Israel.”
The rapidly escalating confrontation between Hamas and Israel followed an Israeli airstrike Wednesday that killed the top military commander of Hamas, and the tit-for-tat violence is widely seen as a potential catalyst for broader hostilities at a time of spreading turmoil in Syria and elsewhere in the region.
Israeli television later reported that Defense Minister Ehud Barak had authorized the military to call up 75,000 reservists if necessary - more than double the 30,000 authorized Thursday.
It was not initially clear whether the show of Israeli force on the ground was meant as more of an intimidation tactic to further pressure Hamas leaders, who had all been forced into hiding Wednesday after the group’s military chief, Ahmed Jabari, was killed by a pinpoint missile strike on his car. But Israel’s preparations seemed to pick up Friday after the attempts to land rockets in Tel Aviv added new urgency while Hamas itself seemed emboldened by Egypt’s support.
“The time in which the Israeli occupation does whatever it wants in Gaza is gone,” said Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas prime minister.
Initially, the Egyptian initiative was portrayed as a potential harbinger of reduced hostilities, and, as Prime Minister Hesham Kandil of Egypt prepared to travel to Gaza, Israel agreed to a temporary conditional ceasefire for the visit. But the truce never took root.
Israel Radio said Palestinian militants had fired 25 rockets into southern Israel, one of them striking a house. There were no immediate reports of casualties.
What sounded like airstrikes by Israeli F-16s were also audible in Gaza City. The Israeli military said no such strikes had taken place, but the Hamas Health Ministry reported that two people, including a child, were killed in the north of Gaza City while the Egyptian delegation was on the ground.
Before dawn today, the Gaza Interior Ministry reported, missiles smashed into two small Hamas security facilities as well as the Hamas police headquarters in Gaza City, setting off a huge blaze that engulfed nearby houses and civilian cars parked outside. No one was inside the buildings at the time.
The Interior Ministry said a government compound was also hit as devout Muslims streamed to the area for early morning prayers. So, too, was a Cabinet building where the Hamas prime minister received the prime minister of Egypt on Friday.
Missiles also knocked out five electricity transformers, plunging more than 400,000 people into darkness, according to the Gaza electricity distribution company.
A separate airstrike leveled a mosque in central Gaza, damaging nearby houses, Gaza security officials and residents said. The military had no comment on that attack and it wasn’t clear whether weapons or fighters were being harbored in the area.
The Israeli military said it did not immediately have an accounting of its various overnight targets.
The number of Palestinians killed so far in the three days rose to at least 30, Gaza health officials said. The number included a man apparently executed by Hamas for what it said was collaboration with Israel in the deaths of 15 Palestinian leaders. On Friday, witnesses in Gaza said an Israeli rocket hit the home of a local Hamas leader at the al-Maghazi refugee camp in the middle of Gaza, killing him and two relatives, and the Health Ministry said a 22-year-old girl died from wounds suffered in an earlier Israeli airstrike.
Three Israelis have been killed in the violence.
The Egyptian prime minister’s visit Friday produced dramatic imagery to underpin his government’s support for Hamas, which Israel, the United States and much of the West consider to be a terrorist organization.
Kandil and Haniyeh visited the Al Shifa hospital amid a huge scrum of bodyguards and journalists, saying they had carried the body of Mohammed Yasser, one of eight children whom Palestinian health officials say have been killed in the surge of violence.
“This is the blood of our children on our clothes,” Haniyeh said as he showed spatters on his clothing, “These are the Egyptian and the Palestinian blood united together.”
Kandil said a cease-fire between Gaza and Israel was “the only way to achieve stability in the region,” and he also called on the Palestinians to repair the rift between Hamas in Gaza and the Fatah group that dominates the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.
The visit was the first of such a high-ranking Egyptian official to this coastal enclave since the militant Hamas faction gained control in 2007, and the visit offered a potent sign of how Egypt’s revolution and new Islamist leadership since the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak last year has shifted the geopolitics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Information for this article was contributed by Fares Akram, Rick Gladstone, Rina Castelnuovo, Mayy El Sheikh, David D. Kirkpatrick and Gabby Sobelman of The New York Times and by Ibrahim Barzak, Josef Federman, Aya Batrawy, Ian Deitch and Amy Teibel of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 11/17/2012