2 January 2009 39 views No Comment Email This Post

The IAF on Friday afternoon fired missiles at former Hamas refugee minister Atef Adwan’s house in Gaza, Palestinians reported. Palestinian sources also claimed that shortly afterward, IAF aircraft attacked smuggling tunnels under the Philadelphi Corridor.
Earlier Friday, the air force bombed the home of Hamas terror operative Muhammad Ma’tuk in Jabalya, northern Gaza.
The IDF said that the house was used as an arms warehouse and weapons lab, and also contained an opening to a tunnel used by Hamas.
In addition, the IAF responded swiftly to the morning’s attacks on Ashkelon, striking the terror cell responsible for firing four Grad rockets at the city.
Overnight Thursday and early Friday, as Operation Cast Lead entered its seventh day, IAF and naval forces attacked some 20 Hamas targets throughout the Gaza Strip.
The army said that among the sites targeted was a mosque in Jabalya used as a terror hub by Hamas. The IDF said in a statement that the mosque was used as a storage site for a large amount of Grad missiles and additional weaponry.

The strike set off a lengthy series of secondary explosions and a large fire, caused by the munitions stockpiled in the mosque, continued the statement, adding that the mosque was
also used as a center of Hamas operations, as a meeting place for its terror operatives and a staging ground for attacks.
Also targeted were: the headquarters of the Hamas military wing, a vehicle transporting anti-aircraft missiles, a tunnel used to smuggle weaponry, rocket launchers loaded and prepared for use, as well as weapons manufacturing and storage facilities, said the army.
The IDF reiterated that it would continue to target infrastructure used by Hamas and
other Gaza terror organizations, and would not hesitate to strike those involved both directly and indirectly in attacks against Israelis.
More than 400 Gazans have been killed and some 1,700 have been wounded since Operation Cast Lead began on Saturday, Gaza health officials said. The number of terrorists and civilians killed is unclear, but Hamas said around half of the dead are members of its security forces and the UN said more than 60 are civilians.
Meanwhile, following Thursday’s death of top terror sheikh Nizar Rayyan, killed in an IAF strike, Ismail Radwan, a Hamas spokesman in Gaza, called on Hamas’s armed wing to harm “Zionist interests” everywhere, Israel Radio reported.
The attack on Rayyan’s Jabalya home liquidated him and wiped out nearly his entire family. All four of his wives were killed along with eleven of his dozen children.
His one surviving son told the Al Jazeera that the children were aged 1-16. He said he was not expecting the air force to be targeting his father.