Declaring that new efforts by the Palestinian Authority (PA) to confront Hamas were insufficient, Israel last night killed four Hamas members in a helicopter strike on a car in Gaza City, and warned that all Hamas members were "potential targets".
Israeli officials also said they blamed the Palestinian Authority's President Yasser Arafat for encouraging recent suicide bombings, including the attack on a bus in Jerusalem last Tuesday in which 21 people were killed, and indicated that he would expelled if there was another major bombing.
Israeli officials said that all four Hamas members killed last night had been involved in orchestrating attacks on Israeli targets, and said two of them were would-be suicide bombers. Hamas confirmed that at least two of the dead men were members of its military wing. Three other people were hurt in the missile strike, including a child.
Israel ordered the strike - four missiles fired from assault helicopters at a single car - after a lengthy meeting of defence chiefs at which a new effort led by the Palestinian Authority's Minister of Security, Mr Mohammad Dahlan, to curb Hamas activities was deemed "too little, too late."
Earlier yesterday, PA forces had entered the Rafah refugee camp at the foot of the Gaza Strip and sealed four tunnels there through which arms had been smuggled in from Egypt. The Israeli Defence Minister, Mr Shaul Mofaz, asserted last night this did not represent the serious crackdown on Hamas that Israel and the United States have been demanding, but was, rather, action taken for propaganda purposes, designed to reduce US pressure on the PA. Tellingly, last night's missile strike was just a few hundred yards from Mr Dahlan's Gaza office.
The army's chief-of-staff, Gen Moshe Ya'alon, warned that Israel was now not drawing any distinction between Hamas gunmen and bombers and those, like Ismail Abu Shanab, killed by Israel in a similar missile strike last week, who were regarded as "political" leaders. "All Hamas militants are potential targets," he warned, "and from our point of view, all members of the organisation are part of the hard core." On a day when Hamas fired one of its Qassam rockets deeper into Israel than ever before, Israeli officials also warned that if the PA did not now intensify its efforts to thwart Hamas, Israeli troops would re-invade the Gaza Strip and any other territory in which bombers were active.
The idea of expelling Mr Arafat is apparently now high on the government's agenda, too. Gen Ya'alon claimed yesterday Mr Arafat has relentlessly undermined efforts by the PA's Prime Minister, Mr Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), to thwart bombing attacks.
Several senior ministers have urged for more than a year that the PA president be sent into exile. Crucially, the Bush administration, which had hitherto urged Israel not to harm Mr Arafat in any way, may now be backtracking.
In remarks at the weekend, President Bush issued no criticism of Israel for killing Mr Shanab, in the wake of last Tuesday's Jerusalem bus bombing, and reiterated that if the Palestinians wanted "to see their own state, they've got to dismantle the terrorist network." Mr Bush also ordered the freezing of assets of a list of Hamas leaders and various organisations apparently linked to Hamas.
Hamas has fired about eight Qassam rockets at Israeli targets in the last few days. Yesterday morning, one of them landed just south of Ashkelon - at least five miles across the border from Gaza, a range that, Israeli officials said, confirmed its assessment that Hamas had used its now-cancelled seven-week intifada ceasefire to improve the Qassam. Later yesterday, Mr Abbas was reported to have deployed PA troops to prevent further rocket fire.
PA officials said that Mr Abbas wanted Israel to give him more time to act against the extremists, and that he was also trying to revive the ceasefire.
The Israeli army continued to operate in Nablus over the weekend, blowing up a weapons factory and reportedly uncovering signs that Hamas is now trying to produce Qassam rockets there too. A Palestinian teenager was hurt by Israeli gunfire in the city on Saturday. In Gaza's Khan Younis refugee camp yesterday, a Palestinian man was badly hurt by shrapnel from an Israeli tank shell.