There were growing fears in Israel last night that Hamas
missiles could threaten its top-secret nuclear facility at
Dimona.
Rocket attacks from Gaza have forced Israelis to flee in
ever greater numbers and military chiefs have been shaken
by the size and sophistication of the militant group’s
arsenal.
In Beersheba, until a few days ago a sleepy desert town in
southern Israel, there is little sign of the 186,000 inhabitants.
Schools are closed and the streets of shuttered shops echo
with the howl of sirens warning of incoming rockets.
Israeli planes, meanwhile, began a new stage yesterday in
their offensive on Gaza, killing Nizar Rayyan, a senior Hamas
official. The one-tonne bomb in Jabaliya is also understood
to have killed two of his four wives and four of his twelve
children. More than 400 Palestinians have been killed in the
six days of Israeli attacks.
Despite a diplomatic mission by Tzipi Livni, the Israeli
Foreign Minister, to Paris, the Israeli army continued to
muster thousands of troops and scores of tanks along Gaza’s
border for a possible ground offensive. Israel’s airstrikes
are designed to blunt Hamas’s capacity to fire its new
Grad missiles deep into its territory. The weapons are smuggled
in through tunnels and by sea, replacing homemade Qassam rockets.
Israeli officials say that Hamas has also acquired dozens
of Iranian-made Fajr-3 missiles with an even longer range.
Many fear that as the group acquires ever more sophisticated
weaponry it is only a matter of time before the nuclear installation
at Dimona, 20 miles east of Beersheba, falls within its sights.
Dimona houses Israel’s only nuclear reactor and is believed
to be where nuclear warheads are stored.
