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 Authorised by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's security cabinet
to escalate an eight-day-old offensive, the military said it had
sent out evacuation warnings in northeastern Gaza.
"Failure to comply will endanger your lives and the lives of your
family," said recorded phone messages received by residents of
Shejaia and Zeitoun districts, which sprawl out toward the border
with Israel and have more than 100,000 residents.
Israeli experts predicted overland raids to destroy command bunkers
and tunnels that have allowed the outgunned Palestinians to
withstand air and naval barrages on Gaza and keep rockets flying.
Israeli shelling attacks killed at least seven Palestinians earlier
on Wednesday, according to Gaza health officials who said the death
toll in the coastal enclave had risen to 202 and that most of the
dead were civilians.
 Israel said 26 rockets were fired at it from Gaza, including at
commercial hub Tel Aviv. Some were shot down by the Iron Dome
interceptor. Others struck without causing casualties, emergency
services said.
World powers urged calm, worried about spiralling casualties should
Israel send tens of thousands of troops it has mobilised into Gaza.
It is one of the world's mostly densely populated areas, its poverty
exacerbated by the collapse of public works and displacement of at
least 18,000 Palestinians who the UN said have taken shelter at its
Gaza City schools.
On Tuesday, Israel unilaterally accepted an Egyptian blueprint for a
ceasefire. The dominant Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, however,
said it had not been consulted by Cairo and kept up rocket attacks
while Israel held back for six hours.
With Palestinian fire having inflicted the first Israeli fatality of
the conflict - a civilian bringing food to soldiers near Gaza -
Netanyahu vowed to "expand and intensify" to stop persistent rocket
strikes that have made a race for shelters a daily routine for
hundreds of thousands in the Jewish state.
"The direction now is to continue air strikes and, if need be, enter
with ground forces in a tactical, measured manner," an Israeli
official said after the security cabinet met overnight.
The Israelis blew up a cross-border tunnel last week which, they
say, may have been just one of many that Hamas has dug for deadly
infiltration raids on their southern towns.
 SINKHOLE
While tunnel-hunting incursions would be far short of a full-scale
invasion and reoccupation, there is still the danger for Israel that
risky and time-consuming missions could fall to Palestinian
ambushes.
Hamas leaders have talked up their "tunnel campaign" against the
Israeli enemy. One publicity video showed Palestinian fighters
hauling rockets through a narrow passage to load onto a launcher
that appears buried in an orchard. It is then fired remotely after
its mechanised cover slides open.
Media reports on the Israeli military suggest it has just one
dedicated tunnel-hunting unit, codenamed "Ferrets" - potentially no
more than a few dozen commandos equipped with breathing apparatus,
attack dogs and scouting robots.
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Detecting the underground network is a problem for Israel - as shown
by the continued rocket salvoes from Gaza despite its intensive,
intelligence-guided air strikes on suspected sites. Geologist
Yossi Langotsky, a retired army colonel and Defence Ministry
adviser, said on Army Radio that Israel had failed to develop
technologies to "hear" hidden digs, allowing completion of the
secret passages that now await activation.
Amos Yadlin, a former commander of Israeli military intelligence,
said a crackdown on the tunnels was pressing, calling them "the
second-most serious threat after the long-range rockets - or the
primary threat, according to some".
Yadlin, who now heads the INSS think-tank at Tel Aviv University,
played down the operational risk to Israel.
"The tunnels cannot be tackled except from the Palestinian side, but
they are in relatively uninhabited areas," he said. "We would not
have a problem maintaining control. I don't accept the argument that
this would be a sinkhole back into Gaza."
 Hamas has faced a cash crisis and Gaza's economic hardship has
deepened as a result of Egypt's destruction of cross-border
smuggling tunnels. Cairo accuses Hamas of assisting anti-government
Islamist militants in Egypt's Sinai peninsula, an accusation that
the Palestinian group denies. The current hostilities were sparked
by the kidnap and killing last month of three Jewish seminary
students in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and the revenge murder of
a Palestinian youth.
Hamas leaders have said any Gaza ceasefire must include an end to
Israel's blockade of the territory, recommitment to a truce reached
in an eight-day war there in 2012 and the release of hundreds of its
activists arrested in the West Bank while Israel searched for the
three missing teenagers.
Hamas also wants Egypt to ease curbs at its Rafah crossing with
Gaza, imposed after the toppling of Islamist President Mohamed Mursi
in Cairo last year.
(Additional reporting by Maayan Lubell and Allyn Fisher-Ilan in
Jerusalem, Noah Browning in Gaza and Michael Georgy and Yasmine
Saleh in Cairo; Writing by Dan Williams; Editing by Jeffrey Heller)
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