Gaza death toll tops 300 as Israeli air strikes continue
• Warplanes target Hamas interior ministry and university
• International condemnation mounts but Israel unrepentant
Israel stepped up its bombing campaign in Gaza today, hitting an interior ministry building, a major university and a house next to the home of the former Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniyeh.
Witnesses in Gaza City reported six separate air strikes overnight at the Islamic University, the leading university in the Gaza Strip which has links to the Islamist movement Hamas. Israeli jets hit a guest house used by the Hamas government. All Hamas leaders, including Haniyeh, have left their homes and gone into hiding.
The Israeli military said it struck dozens more targets including buildings used for storing and manufacturing weapons.
'Every moment you are expecting another bomb'
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Palestinian officials said the death toll since the Israeli bombing began on Saturday had risen to at least 310, with more than 600 injured.
Militants in Gaza fired rockets into southern Israel, killing one Israeli and injuring several others in a mid-morning strike on Ashkelon, a city just north of Gaza. Two Israelis have been killed by Palestinian rockets since Saturday.
In total, Palestinian rockets fired from Gaza have killed around 18 people in southern Israel in the past eight years.
Israeli analysts and commentators said the military's immediate goal was to force Hamas and other militant groups to stop firing rockets and submit to a new ceasefire on better terms with Israel. "Israel can and must mete out a severe punishment to Hamas," Ofer Shelah wrote in today's Ma'ariv newspaper, "one that sears its consciousness (yes, sears its consciousness) and causes it to hesitate before it fires again, and to much more scrupulously control the other organisations."
Israel's cabinet yesterday approved the call-up of thousands of reservists as the military deployed tanks close to the border with Gaza while pressing on with air strikes, suggesting a major ground invasion was being considered to follow the biggest single day of conflict in Gaza since the 1967 war. Earlier today Israel declared areas around Gaza a "closed military zone", citing the risk from Palestinian rocket fire, and ordering journalists observing the build-up of armoured forces to leave.
Ehud Olmert, Israel's prime minister, reportedly told a cabinet meeting the fighting in Gaza would be "long, painful and difficult".
In an attempt to escape the mayhem, hundreds of Gazans broke through the border fence with Egypt at Rafah, where Palestinian gunmen and Egyptian border guards traded gunfire, killing an Egyptian and a Palestinian.
Gaza's hospitals were running short of supplies and had corpses lying on their floors as the morgues filled up.
Israeli air strikes hit 40 smuggling tunnels that had been dug under the border fence to evade Israel's blockade of the overcrowded strip.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) said at least 57 of the dead were civilians. It based the figure, which an UNRWA spokesman called "conservative", on visits by agency officials to hospitals and medical centres.
In Palestinian protests across the occupied West Bank crowds threw stones at Israeli forces, who shot dead a Palestinian protester and critically injured another at Israel's barrier in the village of Nilin.
The UN security council called for a halt to the violence in Gaza and the UN high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, said Israel's use of force was "disproportionate". The US blamed Hamas, the Islamist movement which won Palestinian elections three years ago and then seized full control of Gaza last year.
The Israeli government and Palestinian militant groups in Gaza observed a ceasefire for six months, but it began to break down in November.
In the first diplomatic repercussions for Israel, Syrian officials said they were pulling out of indirect peace talks that have continued over recent months through Turkish mediation. There was condemnation of Israel's actions elsewhere in the Arab world.
Most of the dead in Gaza appear to have been police, though there have been civilians killed. An air strike killed several young people in Gaza City on Saturday in a busy street. Seven of the dead were students at a UN vocational college for Palestinian refugees. Another 20 students were injured.
A pre-dawn air strike yesterday destroyed the headquarters of the Hamas TV channel, al-Aqsa, but it later resumed broadcasting. The main security headquarters in Gaza City were hit again and four people were killed when most of its buildings were flattened.
At a regular weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem, Olmert's government approved the call-up of 6,500 reserve soldiers. "Israel will continue until we have a new security environment in the south, when the population there will no longer live in terror and in fear of constant rocket barrages," said Mark Regev, a spokesman for the prime minister.
Israeli officials, including the foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, have spoken openly of their wish to topple Hamas in Gaza. But most Israeli military analysts said they did not expect the armed forces to seize full control again for fear it would cost the lives of hundreds of Israeli soldiers.
Israel's actions come ahead of a general election due on 10 February. Livni, who is running second in the polls to be prime minister, appeared to rule out a major ground invasion. "Our goal is not to reoccupy Gaza Strip," she said on NBC's Meet the Press programme.
In Gaza the streets were largely empty yesterday. Most shops were closed and schools were shut. Hamas has sounded defiant in the face of the attacks, with Khaled Meshaal, the group's political leader in exile, calling for a "third uprising" among Palestinians.
But the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has accused Hamas of provoking the Israeli raids by not extending the ceasefire.