Palestinian boys drove their cart past a wall covered with graffiti showing rockets in Gaza City yesterday.
(Hatem Moussa/Associated Press)
JERUSALEM - Hamas militants in Gaza recently test-fired a rocket that flew 37 miles into the sea, Israel’s military intelligence chief said here yesterday, a development that would put the environs of Tel Aviv within range and would attest to the success of Hamas in rebuilding its military abilities since Israel’s three-week offensive in Gaza last winter.
A spokesman for Hamas denied that there had been any such launching and said that the Israeli report was timed to divert international attention from accusations that Israel had committed war crimes.
The stated purpose of the Israeli assault on Gaza was to halt incessant rocket fire into southern Israel by striking at the infrastructure of Hamas, the Islamic group that has controlled the Palestinian coastal strip since 2007. Israel came under international scrutiny and censure after hundreds of Palestinian civilians were killed in the war.
The military intelligence chief, Major General Amos Yadlin, told the Parliamentary Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee yesterday that Hamas had fully replenished and improved its stock of rockets, according to an official who attended the meeting.
The official said it was not clear whether the rocket had been smuggled into Gaza or was locally produced, but he said that Yadlin had asserted that those who fired it must have received training abroad, in Syria or Iran.
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