The New Nation - Internet Edition

Reuters, Gaza

Israel rejected any truce with Hamas Islamists on Tuesday and said it was ready for "long weeks of action" on a fourth day of the fiercest air offensive in the Gaza Strip in decades.

As Israeli armored vehicles and troops were massed along the border for a possible invasion, Israeli warplanes pressed on with strikes, killing 12 Palestinians, including a pair of sisters, aged 10 and 12, in attacks on Hamas targets.

Medical officials put the total Palestinian death toll since Israel launched its offensive on Saturday as Gaza gunmen stepped up rocket fire, at 348 and more than 800 wounded. A United Nations agency said at least 62 of the dead were civilians. The latest Israeli attacks came hours after rockets fired by Gazan militants killed an Israeli soldier near the border with Gaza and a civilian in the city of Ashdod.

With six weeks to go to an election that polls suggest the hawkish right-wing Likud party will win, Israel's centrist government says the offensive aims to put a stop to the rockets.

Israeli Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit said "there is no room for a ceasefire" with Hamas before the threat of rocket fire has been removed. "The Israeli army must not stop the operation before breaking the will of the Palestinians, of Hamas, to continue to fire at Israel," he told Israel Radio.

The Israeli military "has made preparations for long weeks of action," added Matan Vilnai, a deputy defense minister, in separate broadcast remarks.

Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum has urged Palestinian groups to respond using "all available means" against Israel, including "martyrdom operations," meaning suicide bombings. Israeli missiles flattened five ministerial buildings and a structure belonging to the Islamic University in Gaza City on Tuesday, witnesses said.

Another strike in northern Gaza's Beit Hanoun, killed two young girls taking out the trash near their home, medical workers and witnesses said. Later a security man was killed in a strike on a headquarters in Khan Yunis, medics and Hamas said. A Hamas sports center and two training camps belonging to the group were also destroyed in the attacks, which plunged Gaza into a blackout as explosions echoed across the city.

Israeli aircraft also fired missiles at the home of a senior commander in Hamas's armed wing. He was not home. Another attack targeted offices belonging to the Popular Resistance Committees militant group.

Broadening their targets to include the Hamas government in Gaza, Israeli warplanes on Monday bombed the Interior Ministry, which supervises 13,000 members of the group's security forces.

The building had been evacuated and there were no casualties. Hamas, an Islamist movement that took over the Gaza Strip in 2007 after routing Fatah forces loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas, defied the Israeli assaults, the fiercest in the coastal territory since the 1967 Middle East war.