Israel warns Gaza of escalation

Israel has dropped leaflets on the Gaza Strip warning residents that it is to escalate its military action.

There is speculation the leaflets may mean Israel will adopt new tactics in its battle with Palestinian militants.

Israel says it has attacked dozens more Hamas targets, including what it says were rocket-launching sites, weapons stores and smuggling tunnels.

Hamas militants fired more than 30 rockets across the border, injuring two Israelis in Ashkelon, Israel added.

Medical staff in Gaza say more than 820 Palestinians have died during the two-week offensive, including 235 children.

Israeli forces quoted by AFP news agency said at least 550 militants had been killed so far. Thirteen Israelis have died in the conflict, most of them soldiers.

The Hamas leader-in-exile, Khaled Meshaal, condemned the Israeli offensive as a "holocaust", in a speech broadcast to millions across the Arab world via al-Jazeera TV.

From his base in Syria, he said Israel had "finished off the last chance" for compromise and settlement, and that the war in Gaza had brought resistance to every Palestinian household.

The conflict has sparked worldwide anti-war demonstrations, with tens of thousands of people joining rallies on Saturday in the US, Europe and the Middle East.



Rocket fire

In Gaza, leaflets and phone messages in Arabic urged residents to keep away from sites linked to Hamas, saying that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) were not targeting Gazans but "Hamas and the terrorists only".

One phone message said "the third stage" of the operation would start soon. It is two weeks since air strikes on Gaza began. The ground attacks started a week ago.

Correspondents say phase three could see Israeli forces moving deeper into cities and refugee camps - involving new risks for Israeli soldiers and civilians in the Gaza Strip.

In what appeared to be the bloodiest incident on Saturday, Palestinian medical staff said eight Palestinian civilians were killed by Israeli fire in Jabaliya - a claim later denied by the Israeli army.

Israel said it had launched more than 70 attacks on Hamas targets by air, land and sea, "hitting armed terror operatives in different incidents".

An Israeli army spokesman said the commander of the Hamas' rocket-launching squads in Gaza City, Amir Mansi, was among those killed.

There has been no word from Hamas, but militants continued to fire rockets into Israel.

Israel is preventing international journalists from entering the coastal strip, and none of the figures could not be independently confirmed.

Strained diplomacy

On the ground, Israeli troops are reported to have moved closer to the edge of Gaza City, though they have yet to go into the most densely-populated areas.

The continued violence comes as rival Palestinian groups converged on Cairo for discussions about an Egyptian ceasefire initiative, which is also sponsored by France.

Israeli strike 'kills family of eight'

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas urged all sides to accept the proposal "without delay", after meeting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Cairo.

But Mr Abbas - who heads the secular Fatah movement, bitter rivals of Hamas - does not control Gaza, and analysts say he will have little impact on the course of the conflict.

Hamas, which was elected in 2006 and took control of Gaza in June the following year, has sent delegates to Cairo for the second time in a week for separate talks.

From Damascus, Khaled Meshaal said a breakthrough would come only if Israel immediately stopped the bombardment, lifted the blockade of Gaza, opened all crossings and withdrew its troops.

Egypt negotiated the last ceasefire between Hamas and Israel but, correspondents say, this conflict has strained an already difficult relationship between Cairo and Hamas.

Israel and Hamas have ignored a UN Security Council call for an immediate ceasefire that would lead to the withdrawal of Israeli troops.

Israel said the continued rocket attacks showed the resolution was "unworkable", while Hamas insisted any truce must include the ending of Israel's economic blockade of Gaza.

Aid agencies say Gaza's 1.5 million residents are in urgent need of food and medical aid.

The UN says it has resumed aid deliveries in Gaza after suspending operations on Thursday when it said the driver of one of its lorries was killed by Israeli fire.

The IDF said it was "100% certain" it did not attack the vehicle.



The violence erupted as a six-month truce between Israel and Hamas unravelled in November and comes one month before a parliamentary election in Israel.

from BBC News

Jobless Rate Hits 7.2%, a 16-Year High

By LOUIS UCHITELLE
Published: January 9, 2009

The nation lost 524,000 jobs in December, reflecting a pervasive fear among employers that if they fail to shed workers quickly their companies may go under in a recession poised to become the worst since the 1930s.

The unemployment rate, meanwhile, jumped to a 16-year-high of 7.2 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Friday. The growing army of the unemployed, at 11.1 million, is nearly 50 percent bigger than at the start of the recession a year ago.

Responding to the report, President-elect Barack Obama said Congress must enact an economic stimulus plan quickly.

The December decline in jobs came on top of similar losses in October and November. Not since 1980 has the work force shrunk so much in just three months. Companies across all industries are grappling with sales that are deteriorating rapidly just as they lose easy access to loans.

“The simplest way for a company to hoard cash is to drain their inventories and fire their workers,” said Robert J. Barbera, chief economist at the Investment Technology Group, a research and trading firm, “and everywhere you look, that is what is happening.”

The total number of jobs lost in the recession now totals 2.59 million, counting upward revisions for October and November, with many more job losses expected in coming months.

Nearly as troubling, hundreds of thousands more people sought full-time work in December but could not get more than part-time jobs.

If those workers are included, the so-called total unemployment rate swelled to 13.5 percent, from 12.6 percent in November and just 8.7 percent at the start of the recession. Total unemployment includes the officially unemployed, the part-timers who seek more hours and the nearly 300,000 who would like a job but tell pollsters from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that they are too discouraged to look.

Employers in nearly every industry cut payrolls. Only health care and education bucked the trend in December, adding just 45,000 jobs combined, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported. Manufacturers, construction companies and retailers led all last year in eliminating jobs, and they did so again in December.

“What happened to jobs in the fourth quarter tells us unmistakably that this recession is going to be a long one and a deep one,” Mr. Barbera said. “The toughest six months,” he added, “will be the just-completed fourth quarter and the first quarter of this year.”

The consensus view of economists surveyed by Blue Chip Economic Indicators is that the economy will continue to contract until July at the very least, but at a slowing pace in the second quarter. That would make it the longest recession since the 1930s, outlasting the two record-holders, the mid-1970s and early 1980s downturns. Each of these recessions lasted 16 months. The current recession, which started in December 2007, would reach that milestone in April.

At a news conference in Washington, Mr. Obama said that behind the latest job statistics were “real lives, real suffering, real fears,” and Congress must bring Americans relief by quickly enacting a stimulus plan. Asked whether he was worried that some lawmakers thought his proposed stimulus program, estimated at $775 billion, was too small, he responded that others thought it was too big and said he was open to a “whole host of ideas” in consultation with Congress.

“You are assuming that I expected it to be easy,” he told one questioner. “No.”

The latest jobs report suggested that many employers tried to cut back hours before resorting to job cuts or hiring freezes. The average number of hours that Americans worked fell to 33.3 a week in December, down two-tenths of an hour, to the lowest level since records first were kept in 1964. Over the course of the recession, average weekly hours worked are down 4 percent.

“There has been a change in psychology as the financial crisis has devolved into a panic,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com. “Businesses have gone from trying to hold onto workers, by reducing their hours, to laying them off in an effort to survive.”

Economists fell over themselves in describing the dire nature of the jobs report, which they said was alarming confirmation that the economy was in the midst of a sharp contraction in which consumer spending and business investment bordered on free fall. Many say that the economy contracted in the fourth quarter at a 5 or 6 percent annual rate and that steep contraction will continue at least through the first quarter, letting up only if Congress approves a sizable stimulus, one that kicks in soon and is at least as big as the $775 billion that the Obama camp has proposed.

“It will add massively to the budget deficit,” said Stuart G. Hoffman, chief economist at the PNC Financial Services Group in Pittsburgh, who counts himself as an advocate of balanced budgets. “But I am not against running deficits in these circumstances, not with so many people losing their jobs.”

Mr. Hoffman expects the unemployment rate, which jumped to 7.2 percent last month from 6.8 percent in November, to rise to 8.5 percent by July and plateau there for the rest of the year.

Others are less sanguine. They see 9 or 10 percent unemployment by early next year, and a jobless recovery that continues for about six months even after the economy ceases to contract.

By comparison, the unemployment rate reached 10.8 percent in the 1981-1982 recession, its highest level since World War II. In those years, unemployment and economic growth rose and fell more or less in tandem. But in the early 1990s that changed. In the 1990-1991 recession and again after the 2001 recession, employers continued to shed jobs for months. In the case of the 2001 recession, employment did not return to its prerecession level for four years.

“Even with the help of a stimulus,” said David A. Levy, chairman of the Jerome Levy Forecasting Center, “the unemployment rate is going to keep rising for the rest of the year, or longer.”


Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting.


From The New York Times

For Arab Clan, Days of Agony in a Cross-Fire

Palestinians set down the bodies of two members of the Samouni family during a funeral in Gaza City on Monday

By TAGHREED EL-KHODARY and ISABEL KERSHNER
Published: January 9, 2009

GAZA — Israel’s attack has razed buildings and upended families in much of crowded Gaza. But few neighborhoods suffered more than Zeitoun, a district of eastern Gaza City. And few families felt the wrath of the Israeli military more than the Samounis.

Israeli troops swarmed Zeitoun shortly after the ground invasion of Gaza began a week ago, and members of the extended Samouni family said they were moved from house to house as soldiers took over the neighborhood. On Monday, with nearly 100 Samounis huddled together in one house, the shooting and the shelling began, according to accounts of family members and witnesses that were partly corroborated by the Red Cross and the United Nations.

Thirty Samounis died, not all of them quickly. Ahmed al-Samouni, 16, survived.

“I could feel the blood dripping inside my head,” Ahmed said, recalling the days he lay wounded in the bombed-out building. “My father was crawling — he couldn’t move his legs,” he said. His cousin Abdallah, 10, was trying to stand up but kept falling down; his brother Yaqoub, 12, kept removing large pieces of shrapnel from his own stomach; and his sister Amal, 9, was not moving at all. Another brother, Ishaq, 12, was wounded in the legs. He bled for two days before he died.

Ahmed, speaking from his hospital bed, said he wanted to call for help. But his mother, Laila, was among the dead, and her cellphone was nowhere to be found.

The story of the Samouni family has horrified many since Red Cross officials on Wednesday publicized their discovery of four emaciated Samouni children trapped for days in a home with the corpses of their mothers. The Red Cross said the Israeli military denied its paramedics access to the area for several days after the ground invasion began on Jan. 3, part of the offensive against Hamas that Israel says is intended to stop the firing of rockets into southern Israel.

Israeli officials said they were still looking into the Zeitoun episode. A military spokeswoman, Maj. Avital Leibovich, said Monday that the army had “no intention of harming civilians.” Hamas, which governs Gaza, “cynically uses” civilians for cover by operating in their midst, she said.

But some international aid officials are arguing that the plight of civilians in Zeitoun, as well as the shelling of a United Nations school where civilians had sought refuge, should be investigated as war crimes.

“Accountability must be ensured for violations of international law,” Navi Pillay, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, said in an address in Geneva to a special session of the Human Rights Council focused on Gaza. The council has a reputation for censoring Israel. Ms. Pillay is a respected South African judge who recently assumed the top United Nations human rights job, which is separate from the council.

Ms. Pillay said, “Violations of international humanitarian law may constitute war crime, for which individual criminal responsibility may be invoked.” She suggested that the council weigh dispatching a mission to assess violations committed by both sides.

The Israeli military has not said whether the strike on the house in Zeitoun was intentional or a mistake. In the case of the United Nations school, Israel has said that Hamas militants were firing mortars from a location near the school.

According to Ahmed and other witnesses interviewed at the hospital, soldiers came to several of the Samouni homes that make up a section of Zeitoun soon after the ground invasion started. They told family members to vacate their homes and to gather together in one home down the street. Ahmed said they were moved a second time as well, until nearly 100 of his relatives crowded into one house.

Soldiers searched and occupied the now-empty houses. The Zeitoun neighborhood is strategically located and is known to have many supporters of Hamas. Ahmed said the Israelis wanted to turn it into “a military camp.”

Samouni family members did not deny that Hamas militants operated in the area. A family member said there was no active Hamas resistance in the immediate vicinity, although militants were firing rockets at Israel a little more than a mile away.

At about 6 a.m. on Monday morning, Ahmed said, tanks started demolishing a wall of the house where the extended clan was sheltered. His father moved toward the door, presumably to warn the soldiers that civilians were inside, but the troops started shooting, he said.

The shooting then stopped, and the soldiers appeared to withdraw. But a short time later, three rockets and several shells hit the building and tore apart the rooms where his family was gathered.

Ahmed said he and his brother Yaqoub pulled blankets over their relatives and managed to shut the doors in an attempt to hide from the tanks and soldiers outside. Everyone was crying, he recalled, and he did not immediately realize the scope of the damage.

Some relatives, like Masouda Samouni, 20, Ahmed’s sister-in-law, managed to crawl out by themselves and arrived at the hospital that same day. A few hours after the attack on Monday, she recounted how she had lost her mother-in-law, her husband and her 10-month-old son.

At that time, witnesses and hospital officials believed that 11 members of the extended family were killed and 26 wounded, with five children age 4 and under among the dead. The first survivors who arrived at the hospital may not have been aware of the full extent of the disaster and apparently had not counted all those left behind.

Ahmed, rescued nearly three days later, named 27 relatives who died in the building where he was hiding; the Red Cross said three more corpses were found in a house nearby.

The survivors ate tomatoes, drank water and cooked noodles over a fire, but tried to avoid attracting the attention of soldiers in the area. Relatives who escaped repeatedly asked the Red Cross to send help, but Red Cross officials said their requests to respond to the emergency were rejected by the Israelis during the initial days of the siege.

It was 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday when help finally came, half an hour before the end of a three-hour pause in the fighting ordered that day by Israel to allow humanitarian aid and rescue workers to enter Gaza.

Antoine Grand, the head of Red Cross operations in the Gaza Strip, said in a telephone interview on Thursday that the first rescue team on Wednesday had to leave the dead and take out only the wounded, “horrible as that seems,” because they had only limited time and only four ambulances.

“We had no other choice,” Mr. Grand said.

He added that the ambulances had to stop on one side of an earth mound put up by the military. The team had to walk a mile to the houses and bring back the wounded in a donkey cart.

On Thursday, they went back to the same area and brought out another 103 survivors, three of them wounded.

A report issued by the United Nations Office for Humanitarian Affairs on Thursday, based on telephone interviews with several members of the Samouni family, largely corroborated Ahmed’s version of events, saying about 30 people were killed when the house was shelled repeatedly. The report said the attack on the Samouni home was one of the “gravest incidents” in the Israeli campaign.

In another statement issued on Friday, the humanitarian affairs office emphasized that its report was not intended to render a legal verdict on the attack.

In a rare public statement on Thursday, the Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross said it believed that in this instance, the Israeli military failed to meet its obligation under international humanitarian law to care for and evacuate the wounded. The delay in permitting entry to rescue services was “unacceptable,” it said.

The rescue team found “four small children next to their dead mothers in one of the houses,” the Red Cross said. “They were too weak to stand up on their own.”

The Red Cross added that Israeli soldiers were posted at a military position some 80 yards away from the house, and there were several other army positions and two Israeli tanks nearby.

Mark Regev, a spokesman for the Israeli government, said Friday that it was important that “we have better channels of communication and coordination” with the Red Cross and other aid groups. He said Israel had an interest in the Red Cross’s “successfully carrying out its mission.”

The Rebirth of Phuket

The infinity pool bar at the Anantara Phuket, which tries to create the feel of the traditional water villages of southern Thailand

By GREGORY DICUM
Published: January 11, 2009

I wasn’t far out from the beach — just beyond the lightly rolling breakers. My feet had left the sandy bottom, and amniotic water burbled around my shoulders. A sea eagle sailed between me and the hot afternoon sun. The starburst tops of a coconut grove delineated the beach. An arc of sugar, it stretched away to a cluster of rounded rocks and, beyond, a rise of greenery leading into the tufted mountains of a national park.

I was floating in the Andaman Sea at Khao Lak, in Thailand’s southwest. A paradise of mangroves, tropical islands and emerald coves set in electric-blue waters, the Andaman Coast is one of the world’s best-known beach destinations. It includes the island province of Phuket, the spectacular small island Ko Phi Phi, hopping Rai Le Beach and more sedate Khao Lak. Its vacation options range from some of the most luxe accommodations on the planet, through unassuming hotels priced for the modest budgets of middle-class European and Asian families, to pristine natural areas accessible only to those willing to rough it. The area is legendary for its lush coral reefs and caves and the green-shrouded sugar-loaf rocks rising from the sea in Phang Nga Bay.

But the softly humid breezes of the Andaman Coast also carry an echo of menace. At the end of 2004, this beach at Khao Lak was littered with bodies and debris. Horrific, indelible scenes that spread around the world almost as fast as what had caused them, the great tsunami. All told, the disaster killed a quarter-million people worldwide and more than 8,000 in Thailand — fishermen, villagers and more than 2,000 foreigners from 16 countries. The United Nations estimated that around 150,000 people in Thailand lost their livelihoods in fishing and tourism that December morning.

I visited this part of Thailand in October, just before the start of the tourist season, with an eye toward assessing the coast’s recovery. What I found was a placid seaside with few signs of the disaster. Instead, it had the expectant atmosphere that any popular tourist area has just before the high season. The beach at Khao Lak was empty, and few tourists were around, but the palm-shaded resorts were spotless and occupied with preseason preparations. Everywhere I went on the Andaman Coast I heard the rhythm of industrious hammers and smelled fresh paint.

Statistics from the Tourism Authority of Thailand support the impression of a full physical recovery for the tourist business — and until political uncertainty and the current global economic crisis sent visitor numbers plunging, an economic recovery as well. Other than Khao Lak and Ko Phi Phi, which, respectively, lost 75 and 60 percent of their hotels, most of the Andaman Coast was spared complete devastation. Hotels were refurbished and repaired, and after visitors returned in large numbers in 2006, a vigorous building boom began. In 2007 alone, Phuket’s stock of hotel rooms climbed a tenth, contributing to an 11 percent increase in visitors to the island, to more than five million — more than in any year before the tsunami. In 2008, more new hotels went up. For travelers willing and able to spend the money to get there, this coast is once again an inviting place to stay.

The Khao Lak area, which suffered much of the Andaman Coast’s worst devastation, now features a low-key set of immaculate resorts attracting families from around the world, especially Northern Europe. Instead of boisterous night life like that in Patong, on Phuket to the south, or stunning cliff faces like Rai Le’s, to the east, Khao Lak’s charm is in its long serene beach at the foot of a range of thickly forested mountains.

Though it retains its mellow vibe, the new hotels are changing things: Khao Lak now features more upscale luxury than it had before, with newer resorts joining rebuilt ones like Le Méridien Khao Lak, which seems to have overcome rumors that it was haunted after the disaster. I found few signs of the tsunami — a vacant lot here and there and a few trees’ exposed roots and stumps of twisted branches alarmingly high up their trunks. The town, a strip of shops, restaurants and tour operators’ offices in utilitarian concrete boxes, was bustling if uninspiring.

As the sun dipped magnificently into the fiery Andaman Sea, I took a place at a split bamboo table by the surf. I dug my toes into the warm sand like a ghost crab and washed down an assertively seasoned green curry with a big bottle of hoppy Chang Beer. Just as the sky turned inky, someone nearby launched a candle-powered paper hot-air balloon. It rose steadily, eventually taking its place as an orange star among the constellations.

THE next day, behind the town, I found unmistakable evidence of the tsunami. A small grassy park surrounds an incongruous police boat that was washed there, a mile from the sea, by the wave. The boat had been guarding a Thai prince who was killed in the disaster, and it became a place of mourning and remembrance.

Certainly, everyone who survived has vivid memories. My driver in Phuket, Marn, told me that 10 members of his family had died in the tsunami. But the forlorn boat, and an abstract memorial sculpture nearby, seemed forgotten. A few foreigners walked around the gray hulk in a warm drizzle, shaking their heads.

If there is any grand physical monument to the disaster, it is the rebuilt coast itself.

“It’s back, stronger than it ever was pre-tsunami,” said Bill Heineke, an owner of the Anantara hotel group, which got its start in northern Thailand and now has nine resorts around Asia. Anantara’s hotel in Khao Lak was destroyed by the tsunami, but in October the group opened a new one on Phuket.

But the area’s economy is at the mercy of more than the awesome forces of nature. Even as I strolled the beach, fresh troubles were brewing. The global economic collapse has been a blow to every region that depends on the disposable incomes of rich countries. Meanwhile, domestic tensions have flared as Thailand’s complex politics works through a particularly intransigent period. Political demonstrations in November closed both of Bangkok’s airports for days, stranding more than a third of a million travelers.

In an indication of how important tourism is to the region, the government of Phuket provided generous aid to stranded visitors (just as many visitors had heroically helped out in the aftermath of the tsunami). Even after the Bangkok airports had reopened, Nick Davies, managing editor at The Phuket Gazette, said, arrivals at Phuket were down by half. By December, in an echo of worldwide troubles, a group of tour operators appealed to the governor of Phuket for debt relief.

Yet the sea remains lambent and calm, and the air touches one’s cheek like a kiss. From the porch of my little bungalow at the Baan Krating hotel in Khao Lak, where leafy palms and umbrella trees clung to the cliff beneath me, towering above the egg-like rocks bathed in clear water below, there was no sign of trouble whatsoever.

With business on the Andaman Coast suffering because of the worldwide slump, taking a beach vacation is actually the best way for foreigners to help. And they should find little reason for fear: political crisis in Thailand almost never has an impact on visitors, and tensions have lessened, making repeat airport closures unlikely.

In fact, now is a great time to go to the Andaman Coast. In normal years, the beaches can be overrun, crowded with as many snorkelers as fish, or by sunburned, jabbering tourists jockeying for position to shoot a scene as it appeared in “The Man With the Golden Gun” or “The Beach,” which were both partly filmed there. But with visitation way off (skittish Asian package tourists are staying away in droves, although Northern Europeans seem unfazed), normally crowded beaches will have noticeable elbow room — even sometimes the solitude that is the often imagined, little realized ideal of a tropical beach vacation.

And bargains are easy to find. Luxury beachside villas at top resorts can be had at the last minute online for hundreds of dollars off their usual published rates. While I was there, I found an oceanfront villa at the two-year-old Ramada Resort in Khao Lak for under $150 a night — nearly three-quarters off the standard rate.

At the high end, the new hotels are competing to push luxury to new levels, — combining global style with Thai hospitality and tropical luxury — with private villas overlooking pristine beaches, pampering by attentive staff, deeply relaxing Thai massage, top quality international food and a sense of splendid respite from the woes of the world. The Yamu, a new high-end hotel scheduled to open late this year in Phang Nga Bay, promises luxuries including a chocolate room; interiors by Philippe Starck and the luxury hotel designer Jean-Michel Gathy; and, for traveling musicians who like to mix work with pleasure, a recording studio.

One of the most prominent new resorts, the Anantara Phuket, opened in October on Mai Khao Beach at the north end of Phuket, a world away from the Jet Skis and beach umbrellas of Kata Beach to the south. (Jet Skis are banned on Mai Khao to protect nesting turtles.)

The resort is laid out along an artificial lake, mimicking a traditional southern Thai water village. Soaring wooden roofs peak above the enclosed compounds of the villas, each of which includes its own small swimming pool and outdoor and indoor sitting areas complete with big daybeds for savoring Thai massages. A dark teak roof and staircase arcing around a banyan tree set off the smoothly polished Treetop bar, with swooping terrazzo, fiber-optic chandelier curtains that sway in the benevolent sea breeze and soft settees for contemplating the setting sun with a ginger margarita in hand.

The rooms themselves are exquisitely well-considered, with big sliding glass doors opening the bedrooms directly onto the shimmering pools, and with big bathtubs sunk directly into the water, separated by a glass partition.

In this cocooned paradise, the misfortunes of the world did intrude slightly: the day after riot police confronted demonstrators in Bangkok, the Bangkok Post’s headline screamed “Brink of Anarchy!”

Perhaps. But that was the only sign of it.

From The New York Times

Israeli Troops Launch Attack on Gaza

JERUSALEM — Israeli tanks and troops swept across the border into Gaza on Saturday night, opening a ground war against the militant group Hamas after a week of intense airstrikes.


The Israeli military said in a statement that the objective of the ground campaign was “to destroy the terrorist infrastructure of Hamas,” the militant Islamic group that controls the area, “while taking control of some of the rocket launching sites” that Hamas uses to fire at southern Israel.

“This will not be short. this will not be easy. I do not wish to delude anyone,” Israel’s defense minister, Ehud Barak, said in a televised statement, adding that the coming days will be difficult for the residents of southern Israel.

The United Nations Security Council called a special meeting for 7 p.m. Saturday in New York to discuss the Middle East crisis.

The ground campaign brought new risks and the prospect of significantly higher casualties on both sides in a conflict that, even before the ground war started, had already taken the lives of more than 430 Palestinians and four Israelis.

While a ground campaign in densely populated Gaza is likely to increase the civilian death toll there, the Israeli Army also faces new threats. Hamas has had 18 months since Israel withdrew from the territory to smuggle in more lethal weapons against tanks and troops. Its more sophisticated arsenal has been on display over the last weeks, as it has launched scores of longer range rockets from Gaza into Israeli cities.

Israeli officials said they want to strike a hard blow against Hamas, improve Israeli deterrence and significantly change the security situation in southern Israel, where residents have been plagued by rocket fire out of Gaza for years.

The ground operation began after a week of intensive attacks by Israeli air and naval forces on Hamas security installations, weapons stores and symbols of government.

Israel unilaterally withdrew its forces from the Gaza Strip and evacuated all the Jewish settlements there in 2005, but it has since carried out numerous incursions of different scales. A 48-hour raid in March 2008 killed nearly 100 Palestinians. Israeli officials said at the time that the aim was to show Hamas the cost of its continuing rocket fire.

Officials have stated repeatedly that the aim is not to fully reoccupy Gaza. But it was clear that the military was leaving the door open for a long-term operation; a spokesman said Saturday that the ground push “will continue on the basis of ongoing situational assessments.” And it remained an open question whether Israel would try to eliminate the Hamas government.

On Saturday night, the Israeli prime minister’s office reported that a call up of thousands of army reserve troops, approved earlier, had begun.

“This has always been a stage-by-stage process,” said Shlomo Dror, a Defense Ministry spokesman, in a telephone interview as the ground campaign was getting under way. “Hamas can stop it whenever it wants,” by stopping its rocket fire, Mr. Dror said.

The exact number of troops entering Gaza was not being publicized, but the military said the ground operation involved “large numbers” of forces including infantry, tanks, engineering and artillery corps.

An Egyptian-brokered truce between Israel and Hamas, which took effect last June, began to break down in November, and Hamas declared it over on Dec. 19. Since then, rocket fire out of Gaza has intensified.

Israeli troops and tanks have been amassed along the border with Gaza for days, waiting for the order to go in. But Israeli officials have long been reluctant to authorize a major ground campaign in Gaza, predicting heavy losses on both sides.

Israeli warplanes carried out dozens of strikes in Gaza throughout the day on Saturday, the eighth day of the Israeli offensive against Hamas.

Many of the Israeli bombings were aimed at open areas around Beit Hanoun and the main route connecting the north and south of Gaza, most likely to clear those areas of mines and tunnels and to hamper movement in order to pave the way for Israeli ground forces.

On Saturday afternoon, Israeli artillery started shelling open areas in the northern Gaza Strip for the first time in the current campaign.

The Israeli Army also dropped thousands of leaflets into some residential districts warning inhabitants to evacuate their homes. Because of “the activity of terrorist groups,” the leaflets said in Arabic, the army “is obliged to respond quickly and work from inside your residential area.”

Many residents of one apartment block in Gaza City said they had nowhere else to go and would stay in their homes.

A mosque in northern Gaza was hit on Saturday during evening prayer time in what witnesses said was an Israeli air strike.

At least 11 worshipers were killed and about 30 wounded, according to Palestinian hospital officials. The Israeli military had no immediate comment.

The air force has struck several mosques in the past week, with the military saying they served as Hamas bases and weapons stores.

Israel began its offensive against Hamas on Dec. 27, and Hamas has responded by firing longer-range rockets deeper into Israel.

The latest round of rocket fire has demonstrated the extent to which Hamas has been able to upgrade its arsenal with weapons parts smuggled into Gaza since it seized control of the territory 18 months ago, according to American and Israeli officials. Compared with the crude, homemade Qassam rockets it had used in the past, the latest rockets have been more accurate and have flown farther — close to two dozen miles, enough to reach the southern Israeli cities of Ashdod and Beersheba.

President Bush, in his weekly radio address to the nation on Saturday, said Hamas had instigated the latest violence. He described the rocket barrages from Gaza “that deliberately targeted innocent Israelis” as “an act of terror that is opposed by the legitimate leader of the Palestinian people, President Abbas.” Mahmoud Abbas is president of the Palestinian Authority, based in the West Bank.

Mr. Bush, expressing deep concern about the humanitarian situation facing the people of Gaza, added that the United States was “leading diplomatic efforts to achieve a meaningful cease-fire that is fully respected.” Such a truce, he said, will require monitoring mechanisms to help ensure that the smuggling of weapons into Gaza ends.

President-elect Barack Obama continued to keep his distance from the crisis. “The president-elect is closely monitoring global events, including the situation in Gaza,” said Brooke Anderson, his chief national security spokeswoman. “There is one president at a time, and we intend to respect that.”

The United Nations Security Council planned an emergency meeting on Saturday night. Earlier, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called for “an immediate end” to Israel’s ground operation, and asked Israel to “ensure the protection of civilians and that humanitarian assistance is able to reach those in need.”

World reaction was intense and mixed. While thousands of protesters marched in cities across Europe to demand a halt to the Israeli bombing, in Prague, a spokesman for the new Czech presidency of the European Union said Israel’s actions were “defensive, not offensive.”

Other European countries quickly distanced themselves from the Czech position. The French Foreign Ministry condemned both “the Israeli ground offensive against Gaza as it condemns the continuation of rocket firing.”

In London, Foreign Minister David Miliband urged both sides to accept an immediate cease-fire.

Before the ground war began, hospital officials in Gaza City put the first week’s Palestinian death toll at more than 430, including 26 women and 74 children.

More than 20,000 demonstrators marched against the Israeli air campaign in Paris and more than 10,000 in London, where some threw shoes at the prime minister’s residence, a particularly Arab form of protest that has gained worldwide currency since an Iraqi journalist hurled his shoes at President Bush last month in Baghdad.

Both protests were held before the ground invasion began. Large protests also took place in at least seven other European countries, Kuwait, Israel and New York.

Three Israeli civilians and one soldier have been killed in the past week by rocket attacks from Gaza.

The Israeli military said Saturday evening that the air force had struck about 40 Hamas targets during the day, including weapons storage facilities, smuggling tunnels, rocket launchers and launching sites. Palestinians said the airstrikes also hit the American International School, a private institution in northern Gaza, killing a school guard.

Israel has also been firing on the homes of Hamas’s military leaders, and on Saturday struck a vehicle in Khan Yunis carrying Mohammed Maaruf, whom the Israeli military described as an officer in the Hamas ground forces. Another strike killed Mohammad al-Jammal, 40, who was said in Gaza to be a Hamas military commander, according to Agence France-Presse. Israel said he was responsible for the entire rocket-launching operation in all of Gaza City.

But in Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, most of the wounded being brought in on Saturday seemed to be civilians.

Salah Abu Rafia, 38, was accompanying wounded relatives, including his 10-year-old son, Zeid. Mr. Abu Rafia said that an F-16 fired missiles around his house in the Zeitoun neighborhood, west of Gaza City, while the family was sitting outside. He said that Hamas fighters had been in the area but that he had been afraid to tell them to go away. They disappeared as soon as they heard the planes, he said, escaping without injury.

“We are the ones paying the price,” Mr. Abu Rafia said.

An Israeli ground operation could draw out the Hamas militants.

The exiled Hamas leader Khaled Mashal, speaking from Damascus, Syria, warned that any ground assault would lead Israel to “a black destiny of dead and wounded,” according to The Associated Press.

Hamas leaders in Gaza were in hiding, but a Hamas spokesman said on Saturday night that the “moment of decision has arrived.”