JERUSALEM, Feb 10: 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 on southern Israel had a leg amputated.

Speaking after huddling with security officials, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned that no-one from the Islamist movement would be excluded from continuing military strikes against the Hamas-ruled coastal strip.

“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 start of 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 who had his leg 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.”

“Enough, we want to live,” read one of the placards held by the demonstrators, who marched on foot to Olmert’s office in the city centre.

Violence in and around Gaza has escalated over the past week as militants have fired dozens of rockets against southern Israel, wounding a handful of people, with the eight-year-old sustaining the most serious injuries.

Israeli military strikes in Gaza have killed at least 20 people over the past week, all but one of them militants.

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni urged the international community to back Israel’s action in Gaza.

“It is part of our responsibility to take certain steps... the only way to stop it is in an understanding of Hamas that Israel will retaliate and that the international community supports Israel in doing so,” she told reporters in her office.

Livni, who heads Israel’s peace negotiations with Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas’s West Bank-based government, said that ending the rocket fire was paramount for peace efforts.

—AFP