MIDDLE EAST: Confirming its determination to "liquidate" the Hamas "hardcore" following the August 19 suicide bombing in Jerusalem, Israel launched its third missile attack in five days against Hamas members in the Gaza Strip yesterday evening.
But in contrast to the previous two such strikes - on August 21st and 24th, in which prominent Hamas figures were killed - yesterday's attack missed its targets: three members of the Hamas Izzedin al-Qassam "military wing".
An elderly bystander was killed, and 20 people injured - at least four of them children - but the trio in the car that was targeted, and destroyed, fled the vehicle before the missiles hit.
Local Palestinians quickly gathered at the scene and chanted calls for revenge against Israel and criticizing the Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mr Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen).
Mr Abbas has been urging Israel to call off such strikes to enable him to try and renegotiate an intifada ceasefire.
But in the wake of the Jerusalem suicide bombing, in which 21 people were killed, the Israeli government of Prime Minister Mr Ariel Sharon is adamant that it will now pursue Hamas to the death.
"These organisations have to be made to disappear," Mr Sharon's ministerial colleague Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister, said last night. And he added a new threat, that Israel would destroy the PA if, as he put it, the PA "continues to host" bombers and gunmen.
Mr Netanyahu described the escalated Israeli missile attacks as "minimal operations" of self-defence, especially when compared with the kind of action the US had taken against Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
Hamas is plainly rattled. It issued a leaflet yesterday urging its activists to keep their movements to a minimum, never use mobile phones, and be aware that they were being watched around the clock. "Negligence is facilitating the Israeli successes," the leaflet stated.
Since Israel killed the senior Hamas leader Ismail Abu Shanab last Thursday, most Hamas leaders have gone underground.
In another military operation earlier yesterday, Israeli troops disguised as Arabs burst into a hospital in the West Bank city of Nablus, and seized two members of the Al Aqsa Brigade, a faction of Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, who had been wounded in a shoot-out with the army last Friday.
Israel alleges that one of the two has helped plan suicide bombings and that the other has been involved in shooting attacks on Israeli targets.
The captured men were rushed to a military ambulance that pulled up outside, and transferred to an Israeli hospital.