TEL AVIV — Civilians in Israel and the Gaza Strip endured a third day of deadly rocket attacks and airstrikes on Wednesday, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying his government planned to further escalate its military campaign against the militant Hamas group.
Amid the worst violence between Israel and Palestinian militants in years, the Israeli cabinet convened to discuss expanding the Gaza operation. Mr. Netanyahu said Israel had rejected requests from Hamas to negotiate a cease-fire and estimated that the Gaza operation would last at least another week.
The fighting has already killed 67 Gazans, including 16 children, according to Palestinian health officials. Seven Israelis, including one teenage girl, have also died, Israeli emergency response officials say.
The tensions have also spurred the most serious outburst in two decades of mass protests by Arab citizens of Israel, who have taken to the streets of towns around Israel in support of Palestinians in Gaza and Jerusalem. That unrest has increasingly led to violent confrontations between Arab Israelis on one side and Israeli police and right-wing Jews on the other.
On Wednesday evening, Jewish and Arab protesters clashed in the central Israeli city of Lod, leading to at least 20 arrests. Similar scenes were repeated in Acre, Tiberias, Jaffa, and several other Israeli cities.
U.S. President Biden said Wednesday he was hopeful a cycle of violence between Israelis and Palestinians would end soon, after a phone call he had with Mr. Netanyahu.
“My expectation and hope is this will be closing down sooner than later, but Israel has a right to defend itself,” Mr. Biden told reporters at the White House.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in a phone call Wednesday with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, condemned “the rocket attacks and emphasized the need to de-escalate tensions and bring the current violence to an end,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said in a statement.
A Palestinian source said truce efforts by Egypt, Qatar, and the United Nations had made no progress to end the violence.
Israel’s Home Front Command ordered the closing of schools and many businesses in Tel Aviv, Netanya, Beersheba, and dozens of other Israeli cities as Hamas continued to fire rockets, and officials barred the gathering of more than 10 people in open areas and of 100 people in closed spaces. The government also suspended or reduced train and bus service through towns in southern and central Israel that were hit by rockets the previous night.
Rockets also struck near Ben Gurion International Airport, which was temporarily closed and planes rerouted. On Wednesday, U.S. airlines United, Delta, and American said they had canceled flights into and out of the airport because of security concerns.
Israeli war planes, meanwhile, have bombed at least three multistory buildings in Gaza, destroying two of them, including a downtown Gaza City tower that housed Hamas’ satellite television channel. On Tuesday evening, Israeli airstrikes brought down a 13-story building in Gaza that the Israeli military said housed Hamas military intelligence offices and a rocket research and development unit.
“Gaza residents, you are experiencing this military operation because the terror organizations have again chosen to place you in the line of fire,” the Israeli military said in a Facebook post. “Stay away from them. Stay away from the places where they operate. Protect yourselves and your families.”
In response Hamas lobbed more than 1,000 rockets and mortar shells toward Tel Aviv and its surroundings and at dozens of communities in southern Israel. One rocket directly hit a bus in the central city of Holon, injuring four people, including a 5-year-old.
In recent years rockets and other projectiles fired from Gaza have landed close to Tel Aviv, mostly in unoccupied fields and forests. By filling the skies above Tel Aviv with its biggest salvos since the 2014 Gaza war, Hamas was seeking to strike fear into a population unaccustomed to being on the front lines, analysts said.
“Militarily it’s not that significant, but psychologically it is,” said Amos Yadlin, a former air force general and military intelligence chief.
The surge in violence was triggered after clashes this month in Jerusalem among Palestinians, Israeli police, and right-wing Jews. Tensions have been running high, in part because of efforts by Israeli settlers to evict several Palestinian families from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem.
Running skirmishes between Palestinian worshipers and Israeli police in and around al-Aqsa Mosque, as well as clashes elsewhere in Jerusalem, injured hundreds of Palestinians.
Israeli military spokesman Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus said Israel has hit at least 350 military targets in Gaza and killed at least 25 combatants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The Israeli military said it, in cooperation with the Shin Bet domestic security agency, carried out a “complex and first of its kind” operation in Gaza City and Khan Younis that killed at least 10 senior Hamas commanders considered close to the organization’s military leader, Mohammed Deif.
Hamas signaled defiance, with its leader, Ismail Haniyeh, saying: “The confrontation with the enemy is open-ended.”
In the central city of Bat Yam on Wednesday, video footage showed what Israeli media called an “attempted lynch in prime time.” It showed a group of Jewish nationalists dragging a man they believed to be Arab out of his car and brutally beating him. A doctor at a Tel Aviv hospital said the man was admitted with serious injuries, per the Associated Press.
“We’re on the brink of a civil war,” tweeted Esawi Frej, an Arab parliamentarian with the left-wing Meretz party. “Hamas missiles are the least of our problems for a country in which Jewish and Arab rioters take to the street to lynch civilians.”
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