Hamas executes 18 accused spies
TEL AVIV, Israel – Even amid a torrent of shocking images from the six-week war in the Gaza Strip, these stood out for their stark brutality: masked Palestinian gunmen on Friday lining up and gunning down 18 fellow Palestinians accused of spying for Israel.
With truces having unraveled, Palestinian militants in Gaza also lashed out against Israel with a barrage of rocket and mortar fire.
A child reported to be younger than 5 was killed in an Israeli farm community near the Gaza boundary, the first Israeli civilian fatality since the early days of the conflict. Tel Aviv residents hurried into bomb shelters as booms sounded over the metropolitan area before sunset. And a synagogue in the southern city of Ashdod sustained a direct hit, resulting in major damage but no serious injuries.
The day was also punctuated by Israeli airstrikes described by the military as hitting unspecified “terrorist” targets in Gaza. Two Palestinian men were reported killed in a strike on the Nusseirat refugee camp.
The mass executions in Gaza, reported by Hamas-linked news media and corroborated by witnesses and human rights groups, came one day after Israeli airstrikes killed three senior Hamas military commanders and three days after Israeli forces took aim at the leader of the group’s military wing, killing his wife and two of his children.
The Israeli strikes were considered the strongest strategic blow yet in the current round of fighting against Hamas, the militant group that dominates the coastal enclave.
Analysts said that to so accurately target the Hamas leaders, Israel’s military would almost certainly have needed human intelligence to supplement electronic surveillance. Friday’s executions were said by Hamas-linked news media to have been decreed by a “revolutionary court.”