Word: striking
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...Israel's midnight air in Gaza killed an alleged terror mastermind - the resultant civilian casualties were a regrettable side issue. For the Palestinians, throughout the Arab world and even in the West the focus was on the thirteen bystanders killed (nine of them children) and 140 wounded in the strike. Those divergent responses suggest that despite U.S. and allied efforts to forge a new path toward peace, a new upsurge of violence may be inevitable. And that has the Bush administration more than a little concerned...
...Salah Shehade, the leader of the military wing of Hamas, was the target of an Israeli missile fired from an F-16 fighter into a Gaza City apartment building early Tuesday. Accusing Shehade of orchestrating dozens of terror attacks on Israeli civilians, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called the air strike one of the greatest successes of his tenure despite the regretful loss of innocent lives...
...That's a little disingenuous; Gaza is estimated to be the world's most densely populated city, and civilian casualties in such an attack were inevitable. The strike was heavily criticized by U.N. General Secretary Kofi Annan for precisely this reason, and even White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said Tuesday that "This heavy-handed action does not contribute to peace." Even in Israel itself, the decision to use a one-ton bomb dropped by an F-16 drew strong criticism, and even Israeli military officials called it an "error." Indeed, despite Sharon's lauding of the raid's "success...
...Hamas has vowed to strike back with suicide bombings, and Israel is on full alert. Shehade may have been a key leader of the organization, but Israelis know his supporters will do their utmost to extract a terrible price for his killing. Hamas and other Palestinian factions will almost certainly try to infiltrate bombers from the West Bank into Israel, but reaching Israeli cities is exceedingly difficult from Gaza, which, unlike the West Bank, is separated from Israel by a border fence. Israeli settlements and military outposts in Gaza are the more likely targets of revenge attacks. The air strike...
...limited its involvement to training Palestinians from other terrorist groups, like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and helping build their military capability. But Israeli intelligence sources tell TIME that during Israel's invasion of Hebron two weeks ago, officials arrested a Hizballah operative who was planning a potentially devastating strike within Israel. The officials say the operative, a Lebanese-born Canadian man known as Abu Ahmed, had been scouting locations for large-scale attacks similar to a failed bomb attempt at a gas depot in May that would have demolished a residential neighborhood in Tel Aviv. Abu Ahmed's arrest, combined...