GAZA: It was a quiet night in the overcrowded Gaza City quarter of Daraj and 27-year-old Imman Hassan Mattar was breastfeeding her two-month-old baby girl Dunia.

Her other children, Ali, 11, Mohamed, 4, and Ayman, 2, had eaten their dinner and gone to bed.

She was unaware that at around midnight an Israeli Air Force F-16 warplane would fly over Gaza and with one missile mix the evening darkness with blood and transform its tranquillity into anguish.

Had Imman known that Salah Shehada, a prominent Gaza militant who had recently rented an apartment in the building, was about to become an Israeli target, she probably would have left her home to spend the night at her parents. She never got the chance. With a huge explosion, the Israeli missile hit the building, causing it to collapse and killing 15 people, eight of them children, and wounding 145 others.

Shehada, head of the Izz a-Din al-Qassam military wing of Hamas, was among the dead, as were his wife and three of his children. Imman and her children were also among the fatalities.

As the missile struck, hundreds of neighbourhood residents gave no thought to fears that the F-16 would fire more missiles, and instead rushed pell-mell to the crumpled building.

They began clearing the rubble frantically, removing destroyed furniture which had belonged to Imman and the other victims.

“Allah U’Akbar, Allah U’Akbar (God is Great). Let (US President George W.) Bush come and see what (Israeli Premier Ariel) Sharon is doing to our children,” cried one resident, still in his nightgown and his face dirty with grey dust from the rubble.

While rescue workers worked through the night extracting corpses from the debris and looking for more survivors, the survivors themselves gathered their clothes and looked for any of their valuables they could extracts form the rubble.

In the morning, the normally bustling Gaza City streets were empty during rush hour. Residents flew black flags from the roofs of their homes while mosques broadcast verses of the Holy Quran from loudspeakers. Thousands of people rushed to Shiffa Hospital to volunteer to donate blood.

Angry members of Palestinian militant organizations drove around the city, calling for revenge against the Israelis and firing bullets in the air.

All Palestinian political and military groups promised that the attack and the 15 fatalities “would not pass without revenge”, threatening to intensify armed attacks against Israel.

Revenge was in fact the word on almost every Gazan’s lips.

“It is a sad day for Gaza,” said Omer Othman, a Palestinian taxi driver, who works in Gaza and spent Tuesday ferrying passengers from Gaza City’s outlying neighbourhoods to the targeted area or to the hospital.

“They (Israelis) are criminals. It is really tragic and hard. I would not be able to keep silent had I seen the remains of my three- year-old child spread across a destroyed building,” he said. Gazans said they believed Israel had destroyed any chance of peaceful coexistence. They added that now, more than ever, they would support suicide bombing attacks against the Jewish state.

“I always opposed the military occupation of our lands, but I did not support targeting Israeli civilians,” Ahmed Awad, a 25-year-old clothes store owner, said.

“But now I feel like I want to kill every Israeli civilian,” he said.—dpa