Israel's military intelligence chief said Hamas' ability to fire rockets had been reduced by 50 percent. Hamas rocket fire dropped off sharply, from more than 130 on Saturday to just over 20 yesterday. Still, Hamas continues to command about 20,000 fighters.
Tzipi Livni, Israel's foreign minister, said on Fox News Sunday that the operation "is needed in order to change the realities on the ground and to give peace and quiet to the citizens in southern Israel."
Militants in Gaza fired barrages of rockets and mortar shells farther into Israel yesterday. One rocket fell in Gan Yavneh, a village near the major port city of Ashdod, almost 20 miles north of Gaza. Two others landed in the coastal city of Ashkelon. Several Israelis were wounded.
Fawzi Barhoum, a spokesman for Hamas, told reporters that Israel had started a war but would not be able to choose how it would end. He called for revenge in the form of strikes reaching "deep into the Zionist entity, using all means," including suicide attacks.
Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority and the leader of Fatah, blamed Hamas yesterday for the bloodshed in Gaza and said it could have been prevented. The hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens within rocket range of Gaza have been instructed by the authorities to stay close to shelters.
In Lebanon, the leader of the Shiite militant group Hezbollah, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, put his fighters on alert, expressing strong support for Hamas and saying that Israel might try to wage a two-front war, as it did in 2006. He called for a mass demonstration in Beirut today. He also denounced Egypt's leaders. "If you don't open the borders, you are accomplices in the killing," he said in a televised speech.
Iran's supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, condemned the silence of some Arab countries, which he said had prepared the grounds for the catastrophe, the ISNA news agency reported.
"The horrible crime of the Zionist regime in Gaza has once again revealed the bloodthirsty face of this regime from disguise," he said in a statement. "But worse than this catastrophe is the encouraging silence of some Arab countries who claim to be Muslim," he said, in an apparent reference to Egypt and Jordan.
Egypt has mediated talks between Israel and the Palestinians and between Hamas and Fatah, leaving it open to criticism that it is too willing to work with Israel. In turn, Egypt and other Western-allied Sunni Arab nations are deeply opposed to Hezbollah and Hamas, which they see as extensions of Iran, their Shiite nemesis.
Across the region, the Israeli strikes were being broadcast almost continually on Arab satellite networks, in grisly detail.
In the Syrian capital, Damascus, a large group of protesters marched to Yusuf al Azmeh Square, where they chanted slogans and burned Israeli and American flags.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.
