News Service from House Harris

MID: 155 dead as Israel hammers Hamas-run Gaza

GAZA CITY, Dec 27 AFP - Israel blitzed Hamas targets in Gaza on Saturday with a wave of air strikes that killed at least 155 people in the besieged enclave in retaliation for ongoing rocket fire, officials said.

An Israeli man died as Hamas swiftly responded to the air raids by firing rockets into the Jewish state.

As Israel warned that the bombardment was "just the beginnning", Hamas told Israelis living near their Gaza stronghold to "prepare the funeral shrouds".

In Gaza, thick clouds of smoke billowed into the sky and mangled, bloody, charred corpses littered the pavement around Hamas security structures in the coastal strip where the bombardment sowed panic in the streets, television images showed.

The deadly attacks came after days of escalating violence around the besieged coastal strip that the Islamist Hamas movement has run since June 2007, with militants firing rockets and Israel vowing a fiery response.

Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas told AFP from Saudi Arabia that he was in "urgent contact" with numerous countries to stop "the cowardly aggressions and massacres in the Gaza Strip".

The bombardment sparked international calls for a stop to the violence, with Russia, France and the European Union calling for an end to the bloodletting by both sides.

Egypt, which brokered a six-month Israeli-Hamas truce that expired on December 19, slammed the Israeli strikes.

"Egypt condemns the Israeli military aggression on the Gaza Strip and blames Israel, as an occupying force, for the victims and the wounded," President Hosni Mubarak said in a statement.

He gave instructions for the Rafah terminal -- the only one that bypasses Israel -- to be opened to allow wounded Palestinians to be evacuated "so they can receive the necessary treatment in Egyptian hospitals", it added.

Hamas called on its fighters to "avenge with force against the enemy" while its militants warned Israelis living near the border to "prepare the funeral shrouds", vowing that the Islamists' response "was on its way".

Israel, which put its communities around Gaza on a state of alert, warned that the deadly strikes were "just the beginning", said an army spokesman.

"The operation will continue and will be expanded as necessary in accordance with the assessments of the army and the defence establishment," said a statement from Defence Minister Ehud Barak's office.

The Israeli onslaught was launched "following... the incessant attacks on Israeli citizens in the south of the country...." and was aimed to "bring the rocket fire to an end", said a statement from Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office.

An army spokesman said Israeli warplanes had carried out the strikes "to stop the terrorist attacks of the past several weeks against Israeli civilian installations".

"We had warned the civilian population in the Gaza Strip of our attacks and Hamas, which hides within this population, is solely responsible for this situation," he told AFP.

Saturday's bombardments hit and destroyed Hamas security structures across the Gaza Strip, the group said. A training base of its military wing, the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades, was pounded in the north of the territory.

The mid-morning air raids followed days of rocket and mortar attacks on Israel by militants inside Gaza, which the Jewish state had warned would be met with harsh reprisals.

Violence in and around the Gaza Strip has flared since the ceasefire ended, and escalated dramatically on Wednesday when militants fired more than 80 rockets and mortar rounds in response to air strikes over the coastal strip.

Israel had responded to earlier rocket attacks by tightening the blockade it imposed after Hamas violently seized power in Gaza in June 2007.

However, dozens of truckloads of supplies were delivered to Gaza on Friday after Israel decided to temporarily allow in humanitarian aid.

Hamas is sworn to destruction of the Jewish state and has warned that it will retaliate by resuming suicide bombings inside Israel. The last such attack claimed by Hamas was in January 2005.