Region

GAZA CITY — Israeli warplanes kept up their deadly raids on Gaza Thursday but failed to prevent Hamas from firing rockets at Jerusalem, two of which struck near settlements in the West Bank.

As the violence escalated, with more than 30 Palestinians killed on Thursday alone, UN chief Ban Ki-moon appealed for an immediate ceasefire at an emergency meeting of the Security Council.

“It is now more urgent than ever to try to find common ground for a return to calm and a ceasefire understanding,” he said as the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation lobbied the UN for a crackdown on Israel.

Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a similar plea in a phone call to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Putin urged an immediate end to confrontation and expressed concern over civilian casualties.

And US Secretary of State John Kerry warned the region was facing “dangerous moment” after speaking to both Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

But Israel appeared bent on dealing a fatal blow to Hamas, with Netanyahu reportedly saying talk of a ceasefire was “not even on the agenda”.

Hamas also appeared to have no interest in letting up, striking deep inside Israel over the past 48 hours, with rockets crashing down near Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and even as far away as Hadera, 116 kilometres to the north.

As sirens wailed across Jerusalem for the second time in two days, a series of loud explosions echoed across the city as the Iron Dome anti-missile system shot down two rockets fired from Gaza, the army said.

Another two crashed down in open areas in the occupied West Bank, one hitting near the Maaleh Adumim settlement and the other landing near Ofer, an Israeli military prison just west of Ramallah, causing no damage or injuries, witnesses and security officials told AFP.

Hamas fighters from Izzeddine Al Qassam took responsibility, saying they had fired “four M75 rockets at Jerusalem”.

Empty streets 

Since the start of the campaign in the early hours of Tuesday, 82 Palestinians have been killed and more than 500 injured.

As the number of victims in Gaza rose, Egypt opened the Rafah border crossing, with hospitals in north Sinai placed on standby to receive the wounded, Egypt’s official MENA news agency reported.

But there have been no Israeli deaths or serious injuries, although medics said one woman died on Thursday, a day after falling while running for cover.

“We are facing long days of fighting and Hamas is trying to surprise Israel with attacks from the air, sea and land,” Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon said on Thursday.

The violence has emptied the streets from Gaza City to Tel Aviv, as both Israelis and Palestinians take shelter indoors for fear of being caught in the open when the next rocket or missile hits.

On the beachfront in Tel Aviv, cafes which would normally have been bursting at the seams at the height of tourist season sat empty, their waiters nervously checking the phones for any news of incoming missiles.

But in Gaza, the story was much darker after an Israeli missile slammed into a coffee shop in Khan Younis, killing nine football fans as they watched a World Cup semifinal match. Another 15 people were hurt.

And Israel has confirmed preparations are under way for a possible ground attack, with tanks seen massing along the border and Netanyahu facing mounting pressure from coalition hardliners to put boots back on the ground in the territory from which Israel pulled all troops and settlers in 2005.

“If we can achieve our goals without a ground operation, we would prefer it this way,” said Yossi Kuperwasser, head of strategic affairs ministry.

860 sites bombed 

Since the start of the operation, the Israeli military’s biggest offensive on Gaza since November 2012, its forces have hit over 860 “terror sites,” 110 of them on Thursday.

In the same period, Gaza fighters had fired 470 rockets, of which more than 350 had struck Israel, while another 87 rockets were intercepted, an army statement said. Of that number, 103 struck Israel on Thursday, while another 21 were intercepted.

Neither side has shown any sign of backing down, and Israel has approved the call-up of 40,000 reservists as it steps up its preparations for a possible ground assault.

Analysts said Hamas had a clear aim: to drag Israel into a ground war hoping to inflict heavy casualties on its troops who would likely come under fire from anti-tank missiles and explosive devices. Fighters would also be seeking to capture Israeli soldiers to use as leverage.

MANAMA — Bahrain has charged the country’s most senior opposition leader and one of his aides with holding an illegal meeting with a US diplomat, the public prosecutor’s office said on Thursday.

It said Al Wefaq Party leader Sheikh Ali Salman and his political assistant, Khalil Al Marzouq, should have obtained permission before meeting Tom Malinowski, US Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labour.

Bahrain expelled Malinowski earlier this week, saying he had “intervened flagrantly” in the country’s internal affairs by holding the meeting. The United States has said it is “deeply concerned” about his treatment and is considering a response.

The incident has opened a rift between Washington and one of its main regional allies. Bahrain hosts the headquarters of the US Fifth Fleet but has bristled at American criticism over its human rights record since suppressing a popular uprising in 2011.

The public prosecutor said Salman and Marzouq were questioned and then charged with “contacting a representative of a foreign government in violation of the political associations law and related ministerial decisions”.

They were freed after guaranteeing their places of residence, it added, without giving any further details.

Al Wefaq confirmed the charges and called them unfair, saying such regulations had never been implemented before and no one had been prosecuted for them.

Malinowski attended a Ramadan evening meeting of Al Wefaq on Sunday and met Salman and an aide again at the US embassy on Monday. He said he was asked whether they had made specific requests of the Americans, and replied that they had not.

Salman and Marzouq were interrogated at the Criminal Investigations Department on Wednesday before they were summoned to appear at the public prosecutor’s office on Thursday. Salman told Reuters he was questioned for about half an hour, without his lawyer, “about the content of the [embassy] meeting and what was discussed at it”.

A court in Bahrain last month cleared Marzouq of terrorism charges.

BAGHDAD — Pictures of smiling locals, tales of life-changing experiences, articles glorifying centuries of heritage and predicting a bright future: if the “caliphate” straddling Iraq and Syria had an airline, Dabiq would be its in-flight magazine.

For now, global jihad’s latest English-language publishing endeavour is distributed online and the aircraft over Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi’s dominion are more likely to be warplanes and drones than commercial jets.

But the 50-page magazine strives to convince its readers that the caliphate proclaimed last month by Baghdadi, leader of the Islamic State (IS) jihadist group on an area twice the size of Israel, is the legitimate and viable home of the world’s Muslims.

In design, it strongly resembles the Inspire magazine published by Al Qaeda’s franchise in the Arabian Peninsula that disseminated bomb-making instructions and aimed to engender “lone wolf” militants, a goal achieved in 2013 with the Boston bomber brothers.

The editorial emphasis in Dabiq, analysts say, is more on state-building than on incitement or operational issues.

“The aim isn’t to get young radicalised Western Muslims to carry out attacks but to come to Syria,” said Peter Neumann, director of the London-based International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation.

Many foreign fighters have already taken that step and Richard Barrett, a former counter-terrorism chief at Britain’s foreign intelligence agency MI6, argued Dabiq was mostly a brochure selling the caliphate as a real and credible entity.

“It is the same phenomenon as advertising techniques that aim to endorse your choice of a product rather than inspire it,” said Barrett, who now works for The Soufan Group, a New York-based consultancy.

Newly rebranded 

Thousands of foreigners have joined jihadist groups in Syria since the start of the war there in March 2011 and many of them are now part of the newly rebranded IS, which has broadened its remit from Iraq into Syria.

Dabiq’s first issue also sings the praise of Jordanian-born Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, an ultraviolent military commander who headed IS’ early incarnations before being slain in a 2006 US air strike, as a founding figure of the caliphate.

The magazine’s introduction explains that it is named after the site of a major 16th century battle in what is now northern Syria that saw the Ottomans defeat the Mamluks and begin a major expansionist phase of an empire Baghdadi and his followers consider to have been the last caliphate.

What the jihadist group “wants to communicate by picking this name is that they’re following in the Ottomans’ footsteps”, said Neumann, a professor at King’s College London.

Dabiq is also mentioned by one of Prophet Mohammad’s companions, Abu Hurayrah, as the place where “Roman” invaders are defeated, paving the way for the armies of God to expand and defeat Satan.

“This apocalyptic theme has been a powerful strand in Islamist extremism for many years, and is apparently a motivator for some,” Barrett said.

Dabiq’s first issue, titled “The Return of Khilafah [caliphate]”, includes excerpts from speeches by Baghdadi declaring a new era in Islam and relays his call for skilled professionals the world over to come and help the new state.

Cheering crowds 

The magazine carries pictures of crowds cheering IS militants as they parade through Syrian and Iraqi towns with the black flag, graphic photos apparently of Sunni civilians slain by the “Rafidhi”, a derogatory term for Shiites, and of Shiite soldiers “heroically” killed by the mujahedeen.

Dabiq also features a long and complex theological article essentially justifying the caliphate and Baghdadi’s position as both religious and political leader.

According to Barrett, IS “has been good at reaching out to supporters and clearly has design skills, but their written work lacks the pizzaz of Inspire”.

Dabiq’s editorial team also oddly chose to illustrate the article on “imamah”, or leadership, with a free-download stock picture of a border collie herding sheep away from a cliff.

“I guess it shows that it’s really made by a Westerner,” Neumann said, referring to the fact that dogs are considered impure in Islamic culture and in much of the Arab world.

Inspire and its promotion of “open source jihad” is believed to have been the brainchild of US-born Yemeni cleric Anwar Al Awlaki but it is not yet clear who is behind Dabiq.

Barrett predicted that the caliphate’s English-language mouthpiece was unlikely to have the same impact and success as Inspire, which became the world’s most downloaded jihadist publication.

“The main propaganda is still through social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other more interactive and ‘modern’ platforms,” he said.

ANKARA — Turkish lawmakers Thursday adopted a bill to revive peace talks with Kurdish rebels, in a move the government hopes will rally Kurdish votes to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan bid to win presidential election next month.

The jailed leader of the outlawed rebel Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), Abdullah Ocalan, hailed the move as a “historic development” and called on Turkey to implement the law “without losing time”.

The law, also deemed as a “turning point” by the government, would grant immunity to key actors including politicians, diplomats and spies involved in peace talks with Kurdish militants. It aims to end a three-decade long insurgency that has claimed tens of thousands of lives.

The six-article package of reforms proposed by Erdogan’s Islamic-rooted government provides a “legal framework” to advance peace negotiations with the PKK, which is designated as a terrorist organisation by Ankara and its Western allies.

It would facilitate the rehabilitation of militants from the PKK who give up arms to return home to Turkey, and give the Cabinet the authority to appoint individuals and bodies to carry out talks regarding the so-called “Kurdish question”.

The law would also prevent officials from being prosecuted for taking necessary measures to ensure that insurgents lay down arms and return to Turkey.

The measures were passed with 237 votes in favour and 37 against in the 550-seat parliament where Erdogan’s AKP party has comfortable majority.

Outgoing Turkish President Abdullah Gul must now sign the bill for it to become law.

Boost for flagging 

peace deal 

Turkey’s Kurds, who long complained of discrimination at the hands of the state, have begun to enjoy broader but limited democratic rights since Erdogan came to power in 2003 — including education in their mother tongue in private schools.

Erdogan’s government launched clandestine peace talks with the Ocalan in 2012 for a peaceful settlement to the conflict in the Kurdish majority southeast.

The rebels declared a ceasefire last year but peace talks stalled in September, when the insurgents said they were suspending their pullout from Turkish soil after accusing the government of failing to deliver on promised reforms including constitutional recognition.

Ocalan, in his message relayed on Thursday by pro-Kurdish lawmakers who visited him in his prison on the island of Imrali near Istanbul, said: “It should not be forgotten that it will be the peoples who will be winners at the end of this process.”

Local media reported on Saturday that Kurdish rebels would begin retreating from Turkey into their safe haven in northern Iraq in September as soon as the reforms came into force.

The withdrawal process is reportedly due to be finalised within 18 months.

This second withdrawal by PKK militants will be subject to legal supervision, unlike the first one that started in May 2013.

Ahead of presidential election 

The presentation of the bill comes as Erdogan is running to succeed Gul.

When he declared his candidacy for the presidency early this month, Erdogan pledged that the peace talks with the PKK would be rekindled.

“Turkey has no other option than a solution, brotherhood and peace,” he said.

Backing from the country’s Kurdish minority, who make up one-fifth of the population, would secure Erdogan an outright victory in the first round of the polls due on
August 10.

The election is shaping up as a two-horse race between Erdogan and opposition candidate Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, an intellectual who has not much chance against the formidable premier.

Another candidate, Selahattin Demirtas, was put forward by the pro-Kurdish HDP party, and is expected to struggle to break into double figures on polling day as many Kurds are expected to vote for Erdogan.

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Iraqi security forces found 53 corpses, blindfolded and handcuffed, south of Baghdad on Wednesday as Shiite and Kurdish leaders traded accusations over an Islamist insurgency raging in the country’s Sunni provinces.

Officials said dozens of bodies were discovered near the mainly Shiite Muslim village of Khamissiya, with bullets to the chest and head, the latest mass killing since Sunni insurgents swept through northern Iraq.

“Fifty-three unidentified corpses were found, all of them blindfolded and handcuffed,” Sadeq Madloul, governor of the mainly Shiite southern province of Babil, told reporters.

He said the victims appeared to have been killed overnight after being brought by car to an area near the main highway running from Baghdad to the southern provinces, about 25km southeast of the city of Hilla.

The identity and sectarian affiliation of the dead people was not immediately clear, he said.

Sunni militants have been carrying out attacks around the southern rim of Baghdad since spring. In response, Shiite militias have been active in rural districts of Baghdad, abducting Sunnis they suspect of terrorism, many of whom later turn up dead.

The tit-for-tat attacks have escalated dramatically since Sunni Islamist fighters seized control of large parts of northern and western Iraq last month, sweeping towards Baghdad in the most serious challenge to the Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki since the withdrawal of US forces in 2011.

Mass killings of scores of victims have become a regular occurrence in Iraq for the first time since the worst days of sectarian and ethnic cleansing in 2006-2007.

The Sunni insurgents, led by the group known as the Islamic State which considers all Shiites heretics who must repent or die, boasted of killing hundreds of captive Shiite army troops after capturing the city of Tikrit on June 12. They put footage on the Internet of their fighters shooting prisoners.

In the following weeks more than 100 Sunni prisoners died in two mass killings while in government custody. The Shiite-led government officially says they were killed in crossfires when their guards came under attack, first in a jail in Baqouba north of Baghdad and then in a convoy moving prisoners from Hilla. Sunni leaders say the prisoners were executed by their guards.

Amnesty International and the United Nations have reported several other suspected incidents of mass killings of prisoners in government custody.

The fighting between the Islamic State, formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, backed by other armed Sunni groups, and the army backed by Shiite militias, threatens to split the country.

The renewed sectarian war has brought violence to levels unseen since the very worst few months of the fighting that followed the US invasion to topple Saddam Hussein in 2003.

Abductions have also increased. On Friday, 17 Sunni Muslims were taken from the Musayyib area and briefly held by security forces and Shiite militia, a local tribal leader said, while a prominent sheikh was also kidnapped by unidentified men.

Barzani flays Maliki

Sunnis have backed the Islamic State’s offensive because of the widespread view that they have been oppressed under the Shiite-led government of Maliki.

The United States and other countries have called for politicians to set up a more inclusive government in Baghdad following a parliamentary election in April. But the new legislature has so far failed to agree on leadership for the country, leaving Maliki in power as a caretaker.

Sunnis and Kurds demand he leave office, but he shows no sign of agreeing to step aside. The Kurds are now closer than ever to abandoning Iraq altogether, with Massoud Barzani, leader of their autonomous region, calling last week for his parliament to ready a referendum on independence.

In a statement late on Tuesday, Barzani launched a withering attack on Maliki, saying his eight years in office had brought disaster to Iraq and set the stage for its latest conflict.

“Today a dangerous precedent is being set, of feeding a chauvinistic campaign of ethnic hatred based on the distortion of reality... to serve political objectives and narrow partisan interests of the person who has caused Iraq to be led from failure to failure and crisis to crisis,” Barzani said.

Kurdish forces have exploited the turmoil to seize control of the city of Kirkuk and its huge oil reserves a month ago, achieving a long-held dream. They regard the city, just outside their autonomous region, as their historical capital, while its oil could provide ample revenue for an independent state.

“We have said we are not prepared under any circumstances to accept for our will to be bent, and go back to square one and face what reminds us of the policies that drowned Kurdistan in seas of the blood of its civilians and turned their homeland to ruins and mass graves,” Barzani said in his statement, referring to years of oppression under Saddam.

“That is what we have clearly faced throughout the period of abuse of power during the two disappointing terms of the prime minister.”

Maliki hit back in a weekly address on Wednesday, accusing Kurds of allowing their provincial capital Erbil to become a haven for the Islamic State and other militants, including former members of Saddam’s now-banned Baath Party.

“We will never be silent about Erbil becoming a base for the operations of the Islamic State and Baathists and Al Qaeda and the terrorists,” he said.

Many Sunni Muslims who fled the mostly Sunni northern city of Mosul during the militants’ offensive have ended up in Erbil.

In fighting northeast of Baghdad on Wednesday, militants took control of the town of Sudor as well as a local dam in fighting which killed four soldiers and wounded six others, a source at the local Al Zahra Hospital said.

Also in Diyala, nine soldiers were killed and 38 were wounded as they repulsed an attack by the Islamic State fighters on the Mansuriya military base on Wednesday, police and hospital sources said.

In the Zaiyouna district of eastern Baghdad, gunmen stormed the house of a government official, beheading his son and shooting dead his wife, a security source and a source in the Baghdad morgue said.

DUBAI — Iran said on Wednesday it had offered ways to address foreign concerns over its underground Fordow uranium enrichment plant, hinting at flexibility on a serious obstacle to a nuclear deal with big powers as a self-imposed July 20 deadline nears.

It was not immediately clear whether the Iranian suggestions were far reaching enough to bridge the gap over Fordow, one of a handful blocking progress towards a long-term agreement that would improve stability in a Middle East riven by conflicts.

France, one of the powers, had said on Tuesday that none of the main outstanding issues in the talks, including Fordow, had been settled and that the United States wanted foreign ministers to join in to help overcome deadlocks.

The United States, Russia, France, Germany, China and Britain want to cap Iran’s capacity to enrich uranium to ensure Iran cannot accumulate potential fuel for atomic bombs. In return, Iran would be rid of sanctions crippling its economy.

Iran denies any intention to derive bomb material from enriched uranium or that it is seeking the technical know-how and means to assemble a nuclear weapon. It says it wants to refine uranium only for civilian energy purposes.

Western powers have in the past called on Iran to shut down Fordow, regarding the plant — built in a fortified bunker deep underground and protected by anti-aircraft batteries — as ideally suited to enriching uranium to weapons-grade.

Iran also has a larger, older enrichment site at Natanz that is better known to UN nuclear inspectors, although the powers seek curbs on the numbers of centrifuges — now an estimated 9,000 — enriching uranium at Natanz as well.

“One proposal is changing the Fordow site into a research and development and back-up site for Natanz,” said Ali Akbar Salehi, head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation, according to comments carried by IRNA.

Research site as compromise?

Some Western experts have suggested that turning Fordow into some kind of research facility could be a possible compromise, but that may not be enough for hawks in the United States and Israel, Iran’s two arch-adversaries.

Iran used Fordow to enrich uranium to 20 per cent fissile purity — ostensibly to fuel a Tehran medical research reactor but also just a short technical step away from bomb-grade material — but halted that activity in January under an interim nuclear deal struck with the powers in Geneva last November.

Tehran is now producing low-enriched — or 5 per cent — material usable for nuclear power plant fuel at Fordow, running some 700 of 2,700 centrifuges it has installed there.

In the past, Iran had ruled out closing any of its nuclear sites, which include a planned heavy-water reactor at Arak with the potential to yield plutonium — another primary fissile ingredient in atomic bombs — along with highly enriched uranium.

Another idea, Salehi was quoted by IRNA as saying, was to convert Fordow into a physics and space radiation laboratory offering services to other countries.

“Agreeing to its conversion into a research and development facility is a concession,” said Ali Vaez, Iran expert at the International Crisis Group. He noted that both sides have shown flexibility on issues such as Arak and Fordow in the past.

But he cautioned: “The problem right now is that they simply can’t bridge the gap on the [main] contentious issues like [levels of] enrichment and sanctions relief.”

Western experts say Iran could now produce enough highly enriched uranium for a bomb in two to three months, a timeline they say should be extended to at least a year. Iran says that even if it wanted such weapons, which it denies, it would take much longer.

BEIRUT — Syria’s Western-backed opposition, the National Coalition, elected Hadi Al Bahra, chief negotiator at the Geneva peace talks, as its new president on Wednesday after a three-day meeting in Istanbul.

The United States and other key powers have designated the National Coalition as the main body representing the opposition to Syrian President Bashar Al Assad, but it has little power inside Syria where disparate militant groups outside its control hold ground.

Bahra, a US-trained industrial engineer, has close ties to regional powerhouse Saudi Arabia, as did his predecessor Ahmad Jarba, who stood down after serving the maximum two six-month terms.

Bahra’s election is unlikely to have any impact on the situation in Syria or within opposition ranks for now, though France — the first Western country to back the coalition — welcomed his appointment and said it was still striving for a political resolution of the conflict.

The United States also applauded Bahra’s selection. “We look to President-elect Bahra and other new leaders to reach out to all Syrian communities and to strengthen unity amongst moderate opposition institutions,” US State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said in a statement.

Infighting within the opposition coalition has undermined rebel efforts to take on forces loyal to Assad, playing into the hands of rival, more hardline groups that include foreign militants, such as the Islamic State.

US- and Russia-sponsored talks to end the three-year-old civil war stalled after two rounds in January and February in Geneva, when the coalition and Assad’s representatives failed to make substantive progress.

Bahra, born in Damascus in 1959, has worked in Saudi Arabia as a businessman running hospitals and a Jeddah-based media and software distribution company, a biography on the National Coalition’s website said.

While welcoming Bahra’s election, the French foreign ministry said Paris would not change its stance of providing civilian and non-lethal military aid. The rebels say they need heavy weaponry to change the balance on the ground in Syria.

“We will continue to provide support to help [the coalition] fight oppression and terrorism,” spokesman Romain Nadal said in a daily online briefing.

“This aid aims to help the moderate opposition protect the population against attacks by the regime and terrorists and provide basic public services in liberated zones.”

A French diplomatic source said there was no real political will in Paris to increase military support and that the French wanted to focus on humanitarian efforts.

GAZA/OCCUPIED JERUSALEM - Israeli air strikes shook Gaza every few minutes on Wednesday, and fighters kept up rocket fire at Israel’s heartland in intensifying warfare that Palestinian officials said has killed at least 47 people in the Hamas-dominated enclave.

Missiles from Israel’s Iron Dome defence system shot into the sky to intercept rockets launched, for the second straight day, at Tel Aviv, the country’s commercial capital. Some were also aimed at Israel’s Dimona nuclear plant, 80km from Gaza, but were either shot down or landed in open country.

With cries of “Allahu akbar” (God is great), Palestinians in the Gaza Strip cheered as rockets streaked overhead towards Israel, in attacks that could provide a popularity boost for Islamist Hamas, whose rift with neighbouring Egypt’s military-backed government has deepened economic hardship.

Dimona, desert site of a nuclear reactor and widely assumed to have a role in atomic weaponry, was targeted by locally made M-75 long-range rockets, fighters said. The Israeli army said Iron Dome shot down one and two others caused no damage — it was unclear how close they came to the town or the nuclear site.

Communities near coastal Tel Aviv and in the south, closer to Gaza, were also targeted. In the longest-range attack since Tuesday, when Israel stepped up its offensive, a rocket hit near Zichron Yaakov, a town 115km north of Gaza.

At least 41 civilians, including 12 children, were among the 47 Palestinians dead in two days of fighting, and some 300 people have been wounded, hospital officials said.

No Israeli deaths or serious injuries were reported and Israeli news reports hailed as heroes the military crews of the Iron Dome batteries, which are made in Israel and partly funded by the United States. The military said 48 rockets struck Israel on Wednesday, and Iron Dome intercepted 14 others.

With frequent explosions from air strikes echoing through Gaza City, its main shopping street was largely deserted. Local residents reported hundreds of attacks on Wednesday.

The Israeli military said it had bombarded 550 Hamas sites, including 60 rocket launchers and 11 homes of senior Hamas members. It described those dwellings as command centres.

Palestinian officials said at least 25 houses were either destroyed or damaged and not all belonged to fighters.

Barrages

Violence building up to the most serious hostilities between Israel and Gaza fighters since an eight-day war in 2012 began three weeks ago after three Jewish students were abducted in the occupied West Bank and later found killed. Last week, a teenage Palestinian was kidnapped and found killed in Jerusalem.

Cairo brokered a truce in the conflict two years ago, but the current, military government’s hostility towards Islamists in general and to Hamas, which it accuses of aiding fellow fighters in Egypt’s Sinai peninsula, could make a mediation role more difficult. Hamas denies those allegations.

Palestinian rocket barrages have sent Israelis racing for bomb shelters, with radio stations constantly interrupting broadcasts to announce where sirens have sounded. But the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange seemed untroubled, ending the day with shares slightly higher.

Israeli leaders, who seem to have wide popular support at home for the Gaza operation, have warned of a lengthy campaign and possible ground invasion of one of the world’s most densely populated territories, home to nearly two million Palestinians.

“We have decided to step up even more the attacks on Hamas and terrorist organisations in Gaza,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement.

“The Israel Defence Forces are prepared for every option. Hamas will pay a heavy price for firing at Israeli citizens.”

Netanyahu’s security Cabinet has already approved the potential mobilisation of up to 40,000 reserve troops.

Netanyahu’s office said he had discussed the situation with United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and US Secretary of State John Kerry and that he would speak to other world leaders later.

Washington backed Israel’s actions in Gaza, while the European Union and United Nations urged restraint on both sides.

US President Barack Obama, in a German newspaper article to be published on Thursday, said: “At this time of danger, everyone involved must protect the innocent and act in a sensible and measured way, not with revenge and retaliation.”

Life appeared deceptively normal in Israeli cities, where shops were open and roads clogged with traffic. But questions were being asked on radio talkshows about an exit strategy and a timeframe for the offensive.

At a sidewalk cafe on a fashionable avenue in Tel Aviv, patrons seemed to take an air raid siren in their stride, staying in line for their coffee as joggers and cyclists passed.

Some 80km away in Gaza, there were scenes outside homes hit by air strikes of panicked neighbours, including mothers clutching crying children, running into the street to escape what they feared would be another attack.

But at one convenience store, which had remained open, customer Abu Ahmed, 65, said he was pleased by the fighters’ resolve: “I am fine, as long as Tel Aviv is being hit,” he said, as he bought cigarettes.

Homes hit

In an air strike on a home in the north of the Gaza Strip, a leader of the Islamic Jihad group and five of his family were killed, the Palestinian interior ministry said. An 80-year-old woman was killed in an Israeli attack on another target in the centre of the 40-km long territory, local officials said.

A 60-year-old man and his son were also killed when two missiles hit their house in Beit Hanoun in the north.

Israeli strikes on fighters’ homes, local residents said, are usually preceded by either warning fire or a telephone call telling its inhabitants to flee, in an attempt by Israel to avoid civilian casualties. But such bombing sometimes injures or kills people in neighbouring houses.

Abbas, who is based in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and entered a power-sharing arrangement with Hamas in April after years of feuding, said he had spoken to Egypt about the Gaza crisis: “This war is not against Hamas or any faction but is against the Palestinian people,” the Western-backed leader said.

Under President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, Cairo has secured closures on the Egyptian-Gaza border, increasing economic pressure on Hamas from a long-running Israeli blockade.

“Sisi stressed Egypt was interested in the safety of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip and sparing this grave assault,” a statement from Abbas’ office said, adding that Cairo would “exert efforts to reach an immediate ceasefire”.

But an Israeli minister appeared to play down any expectations that Egypt would intervene soon.

In the West Bank, about 400 Palestinian youths, chanting their support for Hamas’ armed wing, threw stones at an army checkpoint. Troops responded with tear gas and rubber bullets.

Israel has blamed Hamas for the killing of the three Jewish seminary students who disappeared while hitchhiking in the West Bank on June 12. Hamas has neither confirmed nor denied a role.

The rocket fire from Gaza began after Israel arrested hundreds of Hamas activists in a West Bank sweep it mounted in tandem with a search for the youths, who were found dead last week. A Palestinian teen was abducted and killed in Jerusalem last Wednesday in a suspected revenge murder. Six Israelis have been arrested in that case.

While threatening an “earthquake” of escalation against Israel, Hamas said it could restore calm if Israel halted the Gaza offensive, once again committed to a 2012 ceasefire truce and freed the prisoners it detained in the West Bank last month.

DUBAI — The United Arab Emirates is holding suspected Qatari intelligence agents for questioning on their activities in the UAE, an Emirati newspaper said on Wednesday, in a case that could further damage ties between the two Gulf Arab allies.

Relations between the UAE and Qatar have deteriorated sharply in recent months over Doha’s support for Islamists, who are seen by the rest of the US-allied Gulf Arab oil exporters as a threat to their stability.

A Qatari newspaper reported earlier this week that UAE authorities had detained and subjected to torture three Qatari citizens who were on holiday in the Gulf Arab state.

On its front page the Arabic-language Al Khaleej newspaper dismissed the assertion that those arrested were tourists, quoting unnamed sources as saying that authorities were holding “Qatari intelligence elements operating on UAE soil”.

“They are currently undergoing questioning,” the privately owned newspaper, one of the oldest in the UAE, said, without giving further details.

Qatari officials declined to comment on the report. UAE officials made no immediate comment.

In March, in the biggest public display to date of the rift between Qatar and its Gulf neighbours, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain recalled their ambassadors from the country, accusing Doha of failing to abide by an accord not to interfere in each others’ internal affairs.

Analysts said the dispute was over Qatar’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist movement whose ideology challenges the principle of conservative dynastic rule long dominant in the Gulf.

Qatar made no direct comment on the earlier report that its citizens had been detained, but in an apparent allusion to the case, the foreign ministry said on its Twitter account earlier this week that the state “did not abandon its sons and was taking all measures through legal and diplomatic channels”.

“What happened is just a reflection of the very tense relationship between Qatar and the UAE, and [one should] expect more things like this to happen in the near future,” an Arab diplomat in Doha told Reuters.

“But what Qatar is trying to do now is contain the situation and resolve these problems quietly because it can’t afford the fuss and more negative repercussions.”

To the dismay of its Gulf Arab neighbours, Qatar supported Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood-led government elected after the ousting of long-time autocrat Hosni Mubarak in 2011. Doha provided financial and political assistance until the Islamist President Mohamed Morsi was ousted in an army coup last July.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE also particularly resent Doha’s sheltering of prominent Islamist preacher Youssef Al Qaradawi, a critic of the two states’ rulers, and his regular air time on Qatar’s pan-Arab satellite channel Al Jazeera and on Qatari state television.

In March, the UAE sentenced a Qatari physician to seven years in jail after he was convicted of supporting Islah, an Islamist group banned by authorities.

Since their public spat in March, the four Gulf Arab states have agreed on steps to try to heal the rift, but so far neither Saudi Arabia, Bahrain nor the UAE have returned their ambassadors to Doha.

SANAA — Yemeni authorities on Wednesday accused Shiite rebels of “atrocities” in the northern city of Amran, which they seized in a major advance towards the capital.

In the thick of a bumpy political transition, Yemen is also grappling with an Al Qaeda threat as well as a separatist movement in the south.

Amran, 50 kilometres north of Sanaa, has since February been the scene of fighting between troops and Houthi rebels, as well as tribes on both sides, as the rebels advanced from their mountain strongholds towards the capital.

Home to an estimated 120,000 people, the city fell into rebel hands on Tuesday after a three-day battle which has uprooted some 10,000 families, according to the Red Crescent.

By seizing Amran, the rebels have made a major advance towards the capital, posing a threat to President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi’s government.

Houthi Shiite rebels, known as Ansarullah, “stormed the headquarters of the 310th Armoured Brigade, looted weapons and equipment there, and killed a number of soldiers and officers”, said Yemen’s supreme security committee, quoted by state news agency Saba.

It said they had also taken over government headquarters in the town.

A presidential committee which has negotiated several ceasefires with the rebels said Ansarullah had violated an agreement for the army to withdraw from the city.

Under the deal, the military police was to replace soldiers of the 310th Armoured Brigade as rebels withdrew from government headquarters they had seized.

But the rebels “did not comply with the agreement and attacked the brigade’s headquarters and committed terrifying atrocities”, it charged.

The security committee held the rebels responsible for the safety of the armoured brigade’s commander, General Hamid Al Qushaibi, and “all soldiers and officers” they have captured.

Residents told AFP that rebels had also arrested supporters of the Sunni Islamist party Al Islah, whose gunmen fought alongside the army.

But the city was quiet on Wednesday, residents said, and authorities have so far not announced any offensive to drive out the rebels.

Hadi in Saudi Arabia

Amran’s provincial governor, Mohammed Saleh Shamlan, denied media reports accusing him of having handed Amran city over to the rebels.

“This information is baseless,” he told Saba.

As Ansarullah, secured their grip on Amran, Hadi made a surprise visit to Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia Tuesday to discuss the escalation, according to local media.

He met with King Abdullah, whose country accuses Shiite-dominated Iran of supporting the Houthi rebels.

The rebels have been battling the government for years from their Saada heartland, complaining of marginalisation under former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, who stepped down in 2012 after a year-long uprising and was replaced by Hadi in a Saudi-sponsored deal.

Saudi Arabia itself has also launched operations against the rebels, attacking them by land and air since late 2009.

The rebels say a federalisation plan agreed in February after national talks as part of a political transition would divide Yemen into rich and poor regions.

They seized areas of Amran province in fighting with tribes that killed more than 150 people.

The Houthis are suspected of trying to expand their sphere of influence as Yemen is split into six regions, advancing from their mountain strongholds in the far north.