World Feb. 04, 2009 - 04:25AM JST ( 7 )

JERUSALEM —

Israeli warplanes hit Gaza on Tuesday after Prime Minister Ehud Olmert threatened “the severest riposte” to a military grade rocket fired by Palestinian militants into a southern town.

The rocket attack overshadowed Egyptian-brokered talks aimed at consolidating the unilateral ceasefires declared by Israel and the Islamist Hamas movement that controls Gaza on Jan 18 and drew a sharp rebuke from Washington.

Witnesses said Israeli warplanes bombed smuggling tunnels on Gaza’s border, while Defense Minister Ehud Barak confirmed late afternoon that air operations were under way in the embattled coastal strip.

“I suggest Hamas doesn’t fool around with us,” Barak told a security conference in Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv.

“The air force is operating in Gaza as we speak. We promised calm in the south and we will keep our promise.”

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton demanded an immediate halt to rocket fire from Gaza and announced that she would be sending Middle East envoy George Mitchell back to the region for his second visit in the space of a month.

“Any provocation, even the slightest, will trigger the severest riposte until this fire comes to a complete end,” Olmert told reporters, just hours before the air raids began.

Tuesday’s rocket struck the Israeli port city of Ashkelon causing damage but no casualties, medics said.

The strike on the city, 13 kilometers from the Gaza border, was the deepest that a rocket has penetrated into Israel since the end of Israel’s deadly three-week offensive on the territory aimed at halting the fire by Palestinian militants.

It prompted Olmert to convene an urgent meeting with Barak and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni.

“We have to react hard to this fire,” Livni told army radio.

There was no immediate claim for the rocket attack but Washington placed the blame squarely on the Islamist Hamas movement which has controlled Gaza since seizing power in the territory in June 2007.

“Hamas knows it must stop the rocket fire into Israel,” Clinton said.

“Our conditions with respect to Hamas have not and will not change,” she added, alluding to the consistent demands of the international community for Hamas to recognize Israel and past peace deals, and renounce violence.

She was speaking standing next to the U.S. Middle East envoy who she said would return to the region “by the end of the month” in pursuit of Washington’s goal of “an independent and viable” Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza as part of a negotiated settlement with Israel.

The ceasefires that ended the war after 22 days of a blistering Israeli offensive began unraveling 10 days later when an Israeli soldier was killed in a bomb attack near the Gaza border by Palestinian militants.

Since then, Israeli air strikes on targets in Gaza have killed a civilian and a militant and have wounded some two dozen people. Palestinian militants have fired about 40 rockets and mortar rounds, wounding one civilian and two soldiers.

In Cairo, a Hamas delegation was meeting Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman and expected to give its response to a proposal for a long-term truce around Gaza.

Hamas has said it favors a one-year truce on condition that Israel opens border crossings it has kept sealed to all but very limited basic goods since the Islamists seized the territory from forces loyal to Western-backed Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas.

The truce talks have been complicated by Palestinian factional feuding and on Sunday, Abbas accused Hamas of putting Palestinian lives at risk and trying to smash the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Khaled Meshaal, who heads Hamas’s Damascus-based exiled political leadership, said last week that the PLO, an umbrella group which does not include the Islamists, had become obsolete and called for a “new national authority.”

Wire reports