Palestinians gathering around the ruins of a building after an Israeli missile strike hit the home of a Hamas member in Beit Lahiya, Gaza, on Monday. 
JERUSALEM: Israel continued to launch airstrikes against Hamas targets in Gaza on Tuesday, one day after Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Parliament that Israel is engaged in an "all-out war with Hamas."
The Israeli air force on Monday had hit the organization's civic institutions — the Islamic University, Interior Ministry and presidential guesthouse — as the death toll surpassed 350, some 60 of them civilians, according to United Nations officials.
As the conflict passed into its fourth day, with no active diplomacy, there appeared to be no quick end to the largest assault on Gaza in decades.
"There is no room for a ceasefire," Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit said Tuesday on Israel Radio, as quoted by Reuters.
"The government is determined to remove the threat of fire on the south," he said, referring to rocket attacks on southern Israel by Hamas forces. "Therefore the Israeli army must not stop the operation before breaking the will of Palestinians, of Hamas, to continue to fire at Israel."
Israel has defined its aims relatively narrowly — the crippling of Hamas's ability to send rockets into Israel — but has not made clear if it means to topple the leadership of Hamas, which Israel and the United States brand as a terrorist organization.
Hamas sought to cast its fighters as martyrs in a continuing battle against Israel, the lone resisters in a Palestinian community divided between Gaza, where Hamas rules, and the West Bank, which is governed by the rival Fatah organization.
Hamas killed three Israelis on Monday after firing more than 70 rockets, including a long-range one into the booming city of Ashdod some 18 miles from Gaza, where it hit a bus stop, killing a woman and injuring two other people. Earlier, a rocket hit nearby Ashkelon, killing an Israeli-Arab construction worker and wounding three of his colleagues.
Thousands of Israelis huddled in shelters as the long-range rockets hit streets or open areas late in the night, the most serious display of Hamas's arsenal since the Israeli assault began.
In Gaza, residents pulled relatives from the rubble of prominent institutions leveled by waves of Israeli F-16 attacks, as hospitals struggled to keep up with the wounded and the dead and doctors scrambled for scarce medical supplies. Hamas gunmen shot accused collaborators with Israel in public; families huddled around battery-powered radios, desperate for news.
Barak said Israel would widen and deepen the attack if necessary and told Israeli lawmakers the military would continue the assault until Hamas no longer had the ability to fire rockets into Israel. Politicians on the left who supported the initial attack urged the government to seek a new cease-fire rather than continue the bombardment.
But the military created a two-mile war cordon along the Gaza border and amassed tanks and troops there, with commanders saying that a ground force invasion was a distinct possibility but had not yet been decided upon.
In Crawford, Texas, a spokesman for President George W. Bush renewed calls for the parties to reach a cease-fire, but said Israel was justified in retaliating against Hamas rocket attacks. "Let's just take this one day at a time," said the spokesman, Gordon Johndroe.
Allies of Hamas in parts of the Muslim world raised their voices. In Beirut, tens of thousands of Hezbollah supporters stood in pouring rain in protest, and in Tehran a group of influential conservative Iranian clerics began an online registration drive seeking volunteers to fight Israel.
Barak had told lawmakers that Israel had nothing against the citizens of Gaza and that it had more than once offered its hand in peace to the Palestinian nation. "But we have an all-out war with Hamas and its offshoots," he said.
Israel sent in some 40 trucks of humanitarian relief, including blood from Jordan and medicine. Egypt opened its border with Gaza to some similar aid and to allow some of the wounded through.
At Shifa Hospital in Gaza, the director, Dr. Hussein Ashour, said that keeping his patients alive from their wounds was an enormous challenge. He said there were some 1,500 wounded people distributed among Gaza's nine hospitals with far too few intensive care units, equipped ambulances or other vital equipment.
On Monday, Ashour was not the only official in charge. Armed Hamas militants in civilian clothes roamed the halls. Asked their function, they said it was to provide security. But there was internal bloodletting under way.
In the fourth-floor orthopedic section, a woman in her late 20s asked a militant to let her see Saleh Hajoj, her 32-year-old husband. She was turned away and left the hospital. Fifteen minutes later, Hajoj was carried out by young men pretending to transfer him to another ward. As he lay on the stretcher, he was shot in the left side of the head.
Hajoj, like five others who have been killed at the hospital this way in the past 24 hours, was accused of collaboration with Israel. He had been in the central prison awaiting trial by Hamas judges; when Israel destroyed the prison on Sunday he and the others were transferred to the hospital. But their trials were short-circuited.
A crowd at the hospital showed no mercy after the shooting, which was widely observed. A man in his 30s mocked a woman expressing horror at the scene.
"This horrified you?" he shouted. "A collaborator that caused the death of many innocent and resistance fighters?"
Sobhia Jomaa, a lawyer with the Palestinian Independent Commission for Citizens' Rights, said 115 accused collaborators were in the central prison. None had been executed by Hamas since it took office and their cases were monitored closely.
"The prison provided the sole protection to all of them," she said. "But once it was bombed, many wanted to take revenge."
Across the street from the hospital, a mosque where militants often took refuge has been destroyed by Israel, one of five mosques it has hit so far.
Electricity arrives in Gaza only a few hours a day, offering the diversion of television, but nothing local. The Hamas station was taken out by an Israeli missile and most local radio stations have closed their doors out of fear of suffering the same fate.
Israeli drones buzz overhead taking photographs.
Israel's heavy bombing, more than 300 airstrikes since the operation began on Saturday, reduced dozens of buildings to rubble, but appeared to be directed mainly at the political, military and academic symbols of Hamas's rule in Gaza. The Israelis also made targets of the homes and offices of Hamas's political and military leaders, who did not appear in public during the day.
Despite an apparent effort to limit the attacks to specific buildings, ordinary Gazans are constantly caught up in the bombing. On Saturday, when dozens of Israeli sorties were made simultaneously, a group of young people, ages 18 to 20, were hit when a missile was aimed at a group of Hamas policemen in the street. According to a statement by United Nations Special Coordinator Robert Serry, eight of the young people, emerging from a United Nations training center, were killed instantly and 19 wounded. Eight of those hurt were in critical condition on Monday. One is awaiting emergency transfer to an Israeli hospital.
Serry sent Barak a letter of protest.
In the Jabalya refugee camp on Sunday, an attack on a mosque where militants were hiding also struck a nearby house, killing five girls under the age of 18, health ministry officials said.
Meanwhile in Israel, sirens wailed over mostly empty streets in the seaside city of Ashkelon. Storefronts were battered shut.
Families clustered inside the city's stretches of towering white apartment blocks and single-family houses. Weary of venturing too far outside, they scurried into protected rooms when sirens sounded, listening for the sound of another rocket crashing somewhere in their city.
It is a city that is reluctantly getting used to its status as the front line. "It's frightening, but what can we do?" asked Chen Hassan, 18, a high school senior. She woke up Monday morning, jolted by the sound of a missile hitting a public library under construction across the street.
The rocket killed the construction worker and wounded several others, Bedouins from Israel's Negev Desert.
Ethan Bronner reported from Jerusalem and Taghreed El-Khodary from Gaza. Dina Kraft contributed reporting from Ashkelon, Israel, and Mark Landler from Washington.
International Herald Tribune
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