Israel ignores global pleas as Gaza bombardment claims more lives

ISRAEL yesterday dismissed international calls to stop its devastating aerial bombardments in the Gaza Strip, saying conditions were not yet in place for ensuring that southern Israel remained safe from rocket attacks by Hamas.

"If conditions ripen to the point that we assess they promise a safer existence in southern Israel we will consider it. We're not there," Ehud Olmert, Israel's prime minister, told cabinet ministers.

France had urged Israel on Tuesday to halt the bombardments, which have taken the lives of at least 390 people since they began on Saturday, according to Palestinian officials. Four Israelis have been killed.

At least a quarter of the Palestinian dead are civilians, according to officials of the United Nations' Relief and Works Agency, which operates in Gaza.

With Hamas rockets still landing in the south, including one that struck an unoccupied school in the Negev desert capital of Beersheba, Mr Olmert, the defence minister Ehud Barak, and the foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, decided to pursue the aerial campaign instead. More troops were sent to the Gaza border, raising the likelihood of a ground operation.

In the Israeli view, Hamas is responsible for the war because it refused to renew a six-month ceasefire and instead intensified rocket attacks. But Hamas says Israel violated the terms of the ceasefire by refusing to open Gaza border crossings.

Hamas says it is anything but cowed by the prospect of an Israeli ground assault. "Fighters from all the factions of the Palestinian resistance are deployed in secret locations along the length of the border strip waiting for zero hour," said a dispatch published on its popular Palestinian Information Centre website.

Meanwhile, Palestinian infighting intensified as Hamas accused top aides of the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, of spying for Israel.

President Abbas's secular Fatah movement controls the Palestinians' West Bank territory, but lost control of Gaza to the Islamist Hamas party in 2007. The spying charge, made by Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum, was angrily denied by Fatah leaders.

Mr Barhoum alleged that under the leadership of Tayeb Abdul Rahim, a senior Abbas adviser, Fatah had formed a cell with the purpose of "contacting various Fatah followers in Gaza to collect information on secret Hamas locations and on the whereabouts of the leadership" that is hiding from the Israeli military.

Information gathered would be passed on "through the channels of security co-operation with the enemy," Mr Barhoum added. The charges are part of a larger Hamas media campaign depicting Fatah leaders as colluding with the Israeli military onslaught.

Palestinians say that allegations of collusion are believed by much of the public. "The reports are not necessarily right, but people believe the reports, not the authority," said Hani al-Masri, a columnist for the al-Ayyam newspaper, which is pro-Abbas line. "After all, it is known the authority has security co-ordination with Israel."

The Hamas allegations came after the movement rebuffed an invitation by Mr Abbas to attend a meeting of Palestinian groups to discuss the situation in Gaza.

Images of the carnage have fuelled strong emotions, putting Mr Abbas and his preference for negotiation over armed resistance in an increasingly delicate position, especially since he is seen as having little or no ability to stop the US-backed Israeli campaign.

Remarks by Nimr Hamad, an Abbas aide, suggesting Hamas was culpable in the carnage because it fired rockets at Israel and did not renew the six-month ceasefire are also seen to have backfired against Mr Abbas.

Abdallah Abdallah, a pro-Abbas member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, termed the Hamas allegations of spying "baseless."

"They sow the seeds of fragmentation of the Palestinian people and divert attention from the battle of stopping the Israeli bombardment," he said.

Mr Abdallah said that Mr Abbas was waging a non-stop diplomatic battle to halt the Israeli bombardments.