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Thunder of artillery signals ground push on Gaza
By ARTHUR MAX,Associated Press Writer AP - 27 minutes ago
NIR AM, Israel - The big guns began to thunder as the reddening sun lowered in the sky. After darkness fell, tanks moved like clumsy phantoms toward the border. After seven days of pummeling Gaza from the air, Israel unsheathed its land forces Saturday, raising its war against Gaza's Hamas rulers to a new level.
An artillery barrage in the late afternoon signaled the start of the anticipated ground operation. Israeli military police blocked off all approach roads to Gaza, tightening the off-limits military zone Israel had cordoned off after it launched an aerial onslaught on Dec. 27 to try to silence Hamas rockets that had been pounding southern Israel for weeks.
Warplanes and helicopters flew hundreds of sorties in the previous week, razing Hamas buildings and the homes of its leaders and blowing up caches of ammunition. But Israeli military officials said some targets were inaccessible from the air, often because of unacceptably high civilian casualties.
"There are targets that can be done from the air and targets that cannot," Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said Saturday, shortly before the ground assault began.
At first, the escalated war was more easily heard than observed. Seen from the vantage of a small hill about 3 miles from the border, columns of tanks or heavy personnel carriers ground over the cropland below, their engines whining and their headlights doused.
Helicopters buzzed overhead under a half moon and starry sky. Jeeps raced up and down the border roads.
In Gaza, flashes of high explosives burst into the night sky. Tracer bullets from machine guns threaded thin red lines through the blackness, illuminating the path to their targets for Israeli gunners.
In the nearby Israeli town of Sderot, a favorite target for militant rockets, a few cafes opened after the end of the Jewish sabbath, but streets remained largely deserted.
Even as the Israeli army launched its ground operation, Hamas fighters fired a half dozen rockets into southern Israel, injuring four people. In all, about 40 missiles struck Israeli territory on Saturday _ more than on the average day before Israel began its campaign against Hamas last week to end the bombardment.
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