Defiant Hamas Launches New Rockets Deeper Into Israel

Despite Israel's intense five-day bombing campaign of Gaza, Palestinian militants have begun using longer-range rockets that now reach up to 25 miles inside Israel, hitting cities such as Ashdod and Be'er Sheva for the first time.

Israeli military officials say the rockets are 122mm Grads, which they believe have been smuggled into Gaza through tunnels under the Egyptian border in recent months. The rockets, which are up to three meters in length, can be disassembled and were almost certainly brought through the tunnels in parts, under the border town of Rafah.

In the past, regular Grad rockets had reached up to 12 miles inside Israel, hitting cities such as Ashkelon. But now an enhanced, longer version with a slightly larger 22kg warhead has reached ranges of 25 miles. Rockets fired on Tuesday night and yesterday hit the city of Be'er Sheva, in the Negev desert, for the first time, although they remain inaccurate and are not fired from sophisticated launchers.

Palestinian rockets and mortars have killed four Israelis since Israel's bombing campaign began last Saturday and have caused 20 deaths in Israel in the past eight years. More than 370 Palestinians have died in the past five days of bombing in Gaza.

Israeli military officials believe the rockets are either made in Iran or transferred from there. However, reports in the Israeli press yesterday said some recently fired rockets appeared to have been made in China. Grads, sometimes known as katyushas, have been manufactured by many countries since the second world war.

For the last two days, the Israeli military has bombed the tunnels on the Gazan border with Egypt in an attempt to stop more rockets coming in and one Israeli condition of any ceasefire will be to insist that no smuggling tunnels are allowed in future. The vast majority of the tunnels, however, brought not weapons but food, cigarettes, electronic goods and even farm animals in an attempt to bypass Israel's economic blockade of the Gaza Strip.

One Egyptian official was quoted as saying that Israel had so far destroyed around 120 of more than 200 tunnels.

The use of the longer-range rockets has also raised questions about how much damage the bombing campaign has done to the military wing of Hamas. On Tuesday one Israeli cabinet minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, said it was too early for Israel to accept a ceasefire. "Hamas has not suffered enough damage in the recent strikes," he said. Several of the targets being hit are government buildings in Gaza that are deserted and which have been targeted repeatedly in the past.

Jonathan Fighel, a retired Israeli army colonel and a senior researcher at the Institute for Counter Terrorism in Herzliya, said he believed the bombing had damaged Hamas's ability to govern in Gaza but had yet to seriously upset its armed wing, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades.

"I think not enough damage was done," Fighel said. "The Izzedine al-Qassam's power was not severely damaged and the fact that they were capable of launching rockets this morning shows that the IDF [Israel defense Forces] didn't accomplish their mission in providing security to the southern part of Israel." Fighel said he believed Hamas had further rocket and weapons stores in crowded urban areas that could not easily be destroyed by aerial bombing without large civilian casualties, but which needed to be attacked by Israeli troops, though not necessarily through a major invasion or a long occupation.

"A land phase will be necessary to roll down as much as possible their capabilities of launching attacks," he said. "The problem is that Hamas's motivation was not suppressed. They feel they have changed the agenda for the Israeli population in the south. They have disrupted the life of half of the state of Israel."

He said Israel's goal in continuing its campaign now was to win the most favorable political solution. "The question is now how do you manage to leverage the military campaign into political gain?" He said Israel would look for a ceasefire but under its preferred conditions, which would include a halt to smuggling tunnels and the ability for Israel to continue to attack militants in the occupied West Bank without reprisals from Gaza.