GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip: An Israeli airstrike in Gaza killed three senior commanders of the Hamas military wing Thursday, delivering a likely blow to the organization’s morale and highlighting the long reach of Israel’s intelligence services.

The pre-dawn strike leveled a four-story house in a densely populated neighborhood of the southern town of Rafah, killing six people, including the three senior Hamas commanders.

The trio had played a key role in expanding Hamas’ military capabilities in recent years, including digging attack tunnels leading to Israel, training of fighters and smuggling of weapons to Gaza, Israel said.

It was not immediately clear if their assassination would prompt a change in Hamas strategy in the current round of fighting with Israel or diminish the group’s ability to fire rockets at Israel. The military wing, the Izzedine Al-Qassam Brigades, is a secretive organization.

Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, said in a statement that Israel “will not succeed in breaking the will of our people or weaken the resistance,” and that Israel “will pay the price.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised the “superior intelligence” of the domestic Shin Bet security service and the “precise execution” of the attack by the military.

The targeted killing of the three top Hamas commanders will likely buy Netanyahu some time as the Israeli public is getting increasingly impatient with the government’s inability to halt the rocket fire from Gaza.

Israel and Hamas identified the three as Mohammed Abu Shamaleh, Raed Attar and Mohammed Barhoum.

Thursday’s airstrike was carried out shortly before 3 a.m. in the Tel Sultan neighborhood of Rafah. Gaza police and witnesses said several missiles hit the four-story building.

Hamza Khalifa, an area resident said the house was struck without warning. “We only heard multiple F-16 (warplane) missiles, one after the other, six or seven missiles,” he said.

Several hours later, a large earth mover was still clearing large mounds of debris and wreckage as dozens of area residents watched.

The Rafah attack came a day after an apparent Israeli attempt to kill the top Hamas military leader, Mohammed Deif, in an airstrike on a house in Gaza City.

Deif’s wife and an infant son were killed in that strike, but the Hamas military wing said Deif was not in the targeted home at the time.

The back-to-back targeting of top Hamas military leaders came after indirect Israel-Hamas negotiations in Cairo on a sustainable truce broke down. As talks ran aground on Tuesday, Gaza militants resumed rocket fire on Israel, even before the formal end of a six-day truce at midnight that day.

Since then, Hamas and other groups have fired dozens more rockets, and Israeli aircraft have struck dozens of targets in Gaza, a sign that prospects for a resumption of the Cairo talks are slim.

Despite the crisis, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was holding talks in Qatar on Thursday with the top political leader of Hamas in exile, Khaled Mashaal, and the emir of Qatar. Before the collapse of the truce talks, Abbas had planned to use the meetings in Qatar to urge Mashaal and his Qatari backers to support an Egyptian cease-fire plan.

Hamas has rejected the Egyptian proposal, saying it contained no commitments by Israel to ease the border blockade of Gaza. The blockade was imposed by Israel and Egypt after the Hamas takeover of Gaza in 2007.

Hamas leaders said they could not accept a deal they feared would restore the closure regime that was in place before the start of the latest round of fighting on July 8. The border restrictions prevent most Gazans from traveling outside the crowded coastal strip and bar most exports.

Over the past six weeks of the Gaza war, more than 2,000 Palestinians have been killed in the strip and about 100,000 left homeless, according to figures by the UN and Palestinian officials. Israel lost 67 people, all but three of them soldiers.

It was not clear if the killing of the three Hamas leaders will diminish the group’s ability to fire rockets. Israel estimated that Hamas had 10,000 rockets before the war and that it lost about two-thirds of its arsenal.

In a joint statement, the Israeli military and Shin Bet security service emphasized the importance of Abu Shamaleh, Attar and Barhoum to the Hamas military operation.

Abu Shamaleh had been the top Hamas commander in southern Gaza, it said. Attar was in charge of weapons smuggling into Gaza, the construction of attack tunnels and had played a role in the capture of an Israeli soldier, Gilad Schalit, in 2006. Barhoum was a senior Hamas operative in Rafah, the statement said.

Abu Shamaleh was a confederate of Deif’s who was involved in planning and carrying out at least four major attacks on Israeli soldiers since the 1990s, including one in 2004 that killed four and wounded 10, the statement said.

Attar, it said, was responsible for orchestrating a series of complex attacks on Israeli targets, including through the Sinai Peninsula in neighboring Egypt.

“This morning’s strike sends a clear message to those responsible for planning attacks, we will strike those that have terrorized our communities, towns and cities, we will pursue the perpetrators of abduction of our soldiers and teenagers, and we will succeed in restoring security to the State of Israel,” said an Israeli military spokesman, Lt. Col. Peter Lerner.

In addition to the Hamas operatives, three others were killed in the Rafah strike, including a resident of the house and two neighbors, according to Palestinian health official Ashraf Al-Kidra.

The neighbors were identified as Hassan and Amal Younes, the parents of Issam Younes, the director of Al Mezan, a leading human rights organization in Gaza.

Elsewhere in Gaza, at least six people, including four children and a 27-year-old man, were killed in three other airstrikes, according to Al-Kidra.

Israel also hit at smuggling tunnels along the Gaza border with Egypt and at agricultural lands west of Rafah in Thursday’s airstrikes.

The military said 18 rockets and mortars were fired from Gaza since midnight Wednesday, compared to more than 210 over the previous 30 hours.

An Israeli was seriously wounded when a mortar hit south of the southern city of Ashkelon on Thursday, it said.

In a nationally televised address Wednesday, Netanyahu showed little willingness to return to the negotiating table after six weeks of war with Hamas.

“We are determined to continue the campaign with all means and as is needed,” he said, his defense minister by his side. “We will not stop until we guarantee full security and quiet for the residents of the south and all citizens of Israel.”

 
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