Israel threatened on Sunday to target Hamas leaders in the Gaza Strip as pressure grew on the government to act after a boy hit by shrapnel in a rocket strike from the territory had a leg amputated.
With the escalating violence hampering the recently-revived Middle East peace process, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is to visit the region next week on a new bid to advance negotiations, Palestinian officials said.
Speaking after talks with security officials, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned that no-one from the Islamist Hamas movement would be excluded from continuing military strikes against the territory it has ruled since June.
"We will continue to reach all the terror bodies - those responsible for them, those who send them and those who operate them. We will not exclude anyone," Olmert said at the weekly cabinet meeting.
"We cannot ignore the feelings and frustrations felt in Sderot and nearby communities, especially after yesterday's attack," he said, referring to the eight-year-old child whose leg was amputated after being hit by shrapnel from a rocket fired from Gaza.
"The rage is understandable," he said. "But it should be clear that rage is not a work plan. We must act in an orderly and systematic way over a long period of time. This is what we have been doing and we will continue doing."
Over 100 residents of Sderot, which has borne the brunt of rocket fire, briefly blocked the main highway into Jerusalem to press demands for harsher measures against Gaza militants.
Violence has escalated over the past week as militants have fired more than 100 rockets and mortars against southern Israel, wounding a handful of people. Israeli military strikes on Gaza have killed at least 20 people over the past week, all but one of them militants.
The violence is threatening peace negotiations relaunched in November, officials on both sides warned. "The Israeli escalation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is reflected in the negotiations," Ahmed Qorei, the head of the Palestinian negotiating team, told reporters.
The head of the Israeli team, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, said: "There is no hope for any kind of peace or the vision of a Palestinian state which will including the Gaza Strip without real change on the ground."
Qorei said Rice was due to visit the region in the next few days, while another Palestinian official told AFP her trip would take place on February 18, more than five weeks after her last visit when she accompanied US President George W. Bush on his landmark regional tour.
Cabinet ministers urged Olmert to order strikes against political as well as military leaders of Hamas. "Our duty is to bring them to justice and to bring justice to them," said Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit of Olmert's centrist Kadima party.
Ever since Hamas seized control of Gaza almost eight months ago, calls have mounted in Israel for the army to launch a major offensive against the territory in a bid to stop the rocket fire.
The previous major ground operation, launched in June 2006 after Gaza militants seized an Israeli soldier in a deadly cross-border raid, lasted five months and killed several hundred Palestinians but failed to halt the rockets. Olmert has repeatedly resisted calls for a major offensive in Gaza, from where Israel withdrew settlers and troops in 2005 after a 38-year occupation.
Israel has imposed a series of economic sanctions again Gaza, which it declared a "hostile entity" last September following the Hamas take-over. On January 17, it imposed a full-scale blockade. But amid international fears of a humanitarian crisis in the impoverished territory where much of the 1.5 million population depends on aid, Israel eased the lockdown on January 22, allowing in limited supplies of fuel, food and medicine.
The following day, militants blew open sections of the border barriers separating Gaza from Egypt and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians poured into Egypt to stock up on supplies in the ensuing two weeks.
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