Israel vows more Gaza strikes after deadly blitz

Israel vowed yesterday to keep hitting Gaza even as troops pulled out of the Hamas-run territory after clashes that killed more than 110 Palestinians and dealt a major blow to Middle East peacemaking.
"We are still in the midst of the battle... this is not a one-off," a senior Israeli official quoted Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as telling a parliamentary committee.
"Everything is possible... air strikes, ground strikes and special operations are all being discussed," he said. "Hamas has yet to feel what we'll do, how much and to what extent."
In northern Gaza, residents ventured from their homes to pick through the rubble after the deadliest Israeli military blitz on Gaza in years.
"My whole life I have never seen massacres like this," Aisha, 82, cried raising her hands to the sky as she sat on a demolished door in the northern town of Jabaliya that bore the brunt of the Israeli strikes.
The bloody assault earned Israel international condemnation for excessive use of force and caused moderate Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas to cut contacts with the Jewish state shortly before US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's arrives in the region aiming to push revived peace talks.
Since a dramatic escalation in violence last Wednesday, 116 Palestinians, including 22 children and dozens of militants, have been killed, according to Gaza health ministry statistics. More than 350 were wounded.
Two Israeli soldiers were also killed in the clashes and one Israeli civilian died in a rocket attack launched by Gaza militants.
Israel launched the operation on Saturday in a bid to stop near-daily rocket fire from Gaza, where the Islamist Hamas movement -- which is sworn to Israel's destruction -- seized power in June by routing pro-Abbas forces.
But as has been the case with previous Israeli operations, this one failed to halt the rocket fire -- two projectiles fell in the coastal city of Ashkelon on Monday, lightly wounding one woman, as troops retreated, medics said.
Hamas, which admitted to losing some three dozen fighters in the fighting, boasted that the Israeli withdrawal showed the army had failed.
"This retreat is an expression of the failure of the Israeli soldiers facing the fighters of the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades," spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri told reporters, referring to the group's armed wing.
The violence in and around Gaza sharply escalated early on Wednesday after an Israeli air raid killed five Hamas militants in the south of the impoverished and increasingly isolated territory.
Hamas retaliated by firing a barrage of rockets, one of which killed a civilian in southern Israel, the first such death since May 2007. Rocket attacks have killed 14 civilians inside Israel since the start of the second Palestinian uprising in September 2000.
The clashes reached a peak on Saturday, after Israel sent in a regiment of ground troops into the northern town of Jabaliya in an operation dubbed "Hot Winter" that killed 77 Palestinians in two days.
Amid the bloody assault, Abbas suspended peace negotiations and cut off all contacts with Israel.
The two sides revived peace talks to great fanfare at a conference in the United States in late November, but have made almost no progress since then as a result of deep divisions over core issues of their decades-old conflict.