Israel's Operation in Gaza to Last as Long as Necessary, Netanyahu Says

GAZA CITY - The armed wing of Hamas, the Islamist Palestinian faction that dominates the Gaza Strip, said early Saturday that it was not holding an Israeli officer who has been missing since a deadly clash Friday that shattered a planned 72-hour cease-fire.

The Qassam Brigades, which have led the 26-day-old battle with Israel, suggested in a statement that the officer may have been killed along with his captors in an Israeli assault that followed a suicide-bomb attack by Palestinian militants, who emerged from a tunnel that Israeli troops were trying to destroy near the southern border town of Rafah. Two Israelis were killed in the attack, bringing the military's total casualty count in the operation to 63.

'Until now, we have no idea about the disappearance of the Israeli soldier,' the statement read. 'We do not know his whereabouts or the conditions of his disappearance.' It added, 'Our account is that the soldier could have been kidnapped and killed together with our fighters.'

The statement repeated earlier assertions by Hamas leaders that the Friday clash had occurred at 7 a.m., an hour before the onset of the cease-fire secured by the United Nations and Secretary of State John Kerry. The Israeli military said the attack occurred at 9:20 a.m., and Mr. Kerry, President Obama and the United Nations appeared to accept that account, with statements Friday that clearly blamed the cease-fire's breakdown on Hamas and demanded that the group immediately and unconditionally release the captive.

Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, a spokesman for the Israeli military, said Saturday morning that the search for the officer, Second Lt. Hadar Goldin, had not 'progressed,' but that Israeli forces 'have increased our activities.'

A military statement said Israeli forces had struck more than 200 targets across Gaza in the 24 hours since the Rafah confrontation, including what it described as a 'research and development' lab for weapons manufacturing at the Islamic University. Five mosques that the military said concealed weapons or Hamas outposts were also hit, according to the statement, along with a launcher used to fire rockets toward Tel Aviv around 6 a.m. Saturday.

The Gaza-based health ministry, which had reported 70 people killed in Rafah on Friday, said the casualties had continued there overnight, including seven members of one family who died when their home was bombed. More than 1,650 Palestinians have now been killed in the operation, the ministry said.

Rafah's main hospital was evacuated overnight amid the violence, leaving injured people scrambling to find treatment at small clinics on the other side of the city, according to Gaza-based journalists.

There was no electricity in the area, and Israeli news outlets reported that troops had sealed all the roads out of Rafah to the north. Israeli tanks were seen along the Philadelphi Road, which runs along Gaza's southern border with Egypt and has long been riddled with smuggling tunnels, though Egypt has shut many of them down over the past year. Firefights and heavy airstrikes were reported in the area.

Despite the collapse of the planned 72-hour truce, which was supposed to make way for negotiations on a longer-term cease-fire, Palestinian officials said Saturday that they still planned to send a delegation to Cairo for talks that could start on Sunday. The 12-member team was to be led by Azzam al-Ahmed of the Palestinian Fatah faction - who is aligned with President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, and who helped negotiate an April reconciliation pact between Hamas and the Palestine Liberation Organization - and was to include five Hamas members and two from Islamic Jihad, another Gaza-based militant group.

A spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel declined to say whether Israel would participate in such talks, or whether any decisions on either a cease-fire or an expansion of the Gaza campaign had been made at a rare Friday-night cabinet meeting that stretched past midnight.

news3blog.blogspot.com reported that Mr. Netanyahu had expressed frustration with Washington's diplomatic efforts in a Friday phone call to Dan Shapiro, the United States ambassador to Israel. Mr. Netanyahu told Mr. Shapiro he 'expected' the Obama administration to back Israel's Gaza offensive and 'not to ever second-guess me again' regarding Hamas, The A.P. said, citing 'people familiar with the conversation.'

Asked about the report, Mr. Shapiro declined to comment.

The Qassam Brigades' latest statement underscored the ongoing challenge of matching international diplomacy to the asymmetrical combat on the ground. Mr. Kerry had said that during the 72-hour cease-fire, Israel could continue operations to destroy tunnels into its territory - the stated goal of the ground campaign that it began on July 17. Hamas had rejected an earlier pause in the fighting because of this condition demanded by Israel, which many in Gaza find fundamentally unfair, viewing it as essentially saying that one side can continue its operation and the other cannot.

Qassam said it had only agreed to stop firing rockets on 'Zionist towns and cities' for the 72-hour pause. 'On the operational level, we can't cease firing against the troops advancing into Gaza, which work and move all the time so they could collide with our ambushes,' the statement said. 'This will definitely lead to clashes.'