January 01, 2009	Thursday	Muharram 03, 1430

JERUSALEM, Dec 31: Israel on Wednesday rejected world calls for a truce and pressed on with its controversial Gaza offensive, as warplanes pounded Hamas targets for a fifth day and the militants shot back with rockets.

“The cabinet decided to continue with the military operation,” a senior government official told AFP after a six-hour meeting of the country’s security cabinet that debated international truce proposals.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told the meeting that conditions were not yet ripe to halt the bombardment launched in response to persistent rocket fire from the enclave that Hamas has run for a year and a half.

Amid mushrooming protests around the globe, world diplomats have been scrambling to find a way to stop one of Israel’s deadliest offensives on the Gaza Strip that has so far killed at least 393 Palestinians.

There was no let-up in the violence on Wednesday, with Israel conducting nearly 60 air strikes and Hamas firing more than 50 rockets.

Israel has warned that its “all-out war” on Hamas could last for weeks, has massed tanks on the border of the territory and authorised the call-up of 9,000 reservists, warning of a ground incursion.

Since it was launched on Saturday, the Israeli offensive has killed at least 393 people, including 42 children, and wounded more than 1,900 others, according to Gaza medics. At least 25 per cent of those killed have been civilians, the United Nations said.

The intensive bombardment has reduced much of Hamas’s administrative infrastructure in the territory to rubble but has failed to stop rocket fire into Israel.

Since the start of the Israeli onslaught, Gaza militants have fired more than 250 rockets, killing three civilians and one soldier and wounding several dozen people.

Five of the rockets fired since Tuesday night slammed into the desert town of Beersheba some 40km from the Gaza border — the deepest yet that its projectiles have reached inside Israel.

Hamas has also threatened to carry out suicide attacks inside Israel for the first time since January 2005.

The Israeli bombardment has raised concern about the humanitarian situation in Gaza, a tiny, aid-dependent territory of 1.5 million people which Israel has virtually sealed off since Hamas seized power in June 2007.

“Gaza’s hospitals are facing their largest ever trauma caseloads under some of the most adverse conditions imaginable,” UN humanitarian coordinator Maxwell Gaylard said.

Israel opened one of its border crossings with Gaza again on Wednesday, bringing to 179 the number of lorryloads of supplies delivered since the Gaza bombardment began, the army said.—AFP