JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Sunday ruled out a broad military operation in the Gaza Strip, deflecting rising anger after an 8-year-old boy lost a leg in a Palestinian rocket attack.
But Israel’s top diplomat warned it will be impossible to reach a peace agreement with Palestinians as long as the Hamas rulers of Gaza continue to foment violence.
“Anger is not an operational plan,” Olmert said in response to clamoring for a full-scale invasion of northern Gaza to take over the areas where militants have been launching the rockets. There were calls from the Cabinet for assassinating Hamas political leaders.
Residents of the battered town of Sderot near Gaza blocked the main highway entrance into Jerusalem as the Cabinet met. They demanded government action after doctors amputated Osher Twito’s leg after a rocket attack that also wounded his 19-year-old brother.
“He loves playing soccer, but he will never play again,” Osher’s mother, Iris Twito, wailed on Channel 2 TV. “How can he play now with no leg?”
Over the weekend, Hamas militants called on Israelis to flee from border towns as rockets rained down. The two brothers were wounded Saturday night when a rocket exploded next to them in Sderot, one of dozens that hit in and near the town of 20,000 less than half a mile from the fence around Gaza.
The boy’s serious injury galvanized Israeli outrage.
“We must take a neighborhood in Gaza and wipe it off the map,” said Cabinet Minister Meir Sheetrit.
At nightfall, about 20 Israeli army vehicles rolled into northern Gaza, where most of the rockets are fired, witnesses said.
The military called the operation “routine.” In an exchange of gunfire at the border, a Palestinian militant was killed.
