Israel Fires Into Syria After Shell Hits Post
Israel Fires Into Syria After Shell Hits Post
By ISABEL KERSHNER
Published: November 11, 2012
SDEROT, Israel — Israel confronted fire along two of its borders on
Sunday, with rockets landing from Gaza and a mortar shell crashing in
from Syria,
prompting Israel to respond with what its military described as
“warning shots” at a Syrian position across the frontier for the first
time in 39 years.
From the early hours of Sunday morning through nightfall, more than 50 rockets fired by Palestinian
militants from Gaza struck southern Israel. The first heavy barrage
came as residents of this rocket-battered town near the Gaza border were
getting up to go to work and school.
Around noon, to the north, a stray Syrian mortar shell hit an Israeli
military post on the Israeli-held Golan Heights as Syrian government
forces battled armed rebels on the other side of the Israeli-Syrian
armistice line that has been in place for decades. It was the fourth time in just over a week that spillover from the Syrian civil war had crept toward Israel.
After years of relative quiet along the country’s borders, Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu finds himself tested on two fronts. Under
increasing pressure and with Israelis scheduled to go the polls in
January, the nation’s leaders are talking tough and threatening broader
action.
“The world needs to understand that Israel will not sit idly by in the
face of attempts to attack us,” Mr. Netanyahu told his cabinet on Sunday
morning. “We are prepared to intensify the response.”
Israeli defense officials have made it clear that Israel has no desire
to get involved in the fighting in Syria. Israel already filed
complaints with the United Nations observer force that monitors the
armistice agreement reached between the Israeli and Syrian forces after
the 1973 war, and the United Nations has warned that the spreading
violence could jeopardize the cease-fire between the two countries.
“We hope they get the message this time,” Moshe Yaalon, Israel’s
minister of strategic affairs, told Israeli television, referring to the
missile fired at a Syrian mortar battery.
But while Israel views the fire from Syria as unintentional, though
still unacceptable, the rockets from Gaza are deliberately aimed at
population centers. Hamas, the Islamic militant group that controls the
Palestinian coastal enclave, has claimed credit for participating in
several recent rounds of rocket fire.
The latest surge began on Saturday when Palestinian militants fired an
antitank missile at an Israeli military jeep patrolling Israel’s
increasingly volatile border with Gaza, wounding four soldiers. Four
Palestinian civilians were killed when Israel returned fire with tank or
artillery shells, prompting new rocket fire against southern Israel. At
least one Palestinian militant from a rocket-launching squad was killed
in an Israeli airstrike.
Responding to years of rocket attacks, Israel carried out a three-week
offensive against the militant groups in Gaza in the winter of 2008-9,
resulting in an informal and shaky cease-fire. After three civilians
were wounded by shrapnel in the Sderot area early Sunday morning, Silvan
Shalom, a vice prime minister from Mr. Netanyahu’s conservative Likud
Party, said that Israel was “not eager” to embark on another major
ground operation in Gaza, but that the military was prepared to act.
Yisrael Katz, another Likud minister, called for the liquidation of the
Hamas leadership in Gaza and said that Israel should stop supplying the
enclave with water, electricity, food and fuel.
In a statement, the defense minister, Ehud Barak, said that the military
had been “evaluating a host of options for harsher responses against
Hamas and the other terror organizations in Gaza” and that “it is Hamas
that will pay the heavy price, a price that will be painful.”
In Sderot, residents were told to stay close to fortified rooms and bomb
shelters. School was canceled. A factory in the industrial zone
suffered a direct hit. Later, a rocket landed on a house with the
residents inside, though they escaped injury.
“Israel could finish the whole story in one day,” said Shimon Biton, 75,
who owns a hardware store in the market area. “It has the weapons and
the intelligence. But our hands are bound, because America says ‘no.’
Gaza is packed with civilians, and the rockets are kept in their homes.”
Shulamit Amar, 40, said her 13-year-old son was terrified of the
rockets, especially since one exploded in the yard behind their
apartment block last year. “We raise our eyes to heaven,” she said.
“Only God will help us.”
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