SDEROT, Israel — Israel confronted fire along two of its borders on Sunday, with rockets landing from and a mortar shell crashing in from , prompting Israel to respond with what its military described as “warning shots” at a Syrian position across the frontier for the first time in 39 years.
From the early hours of Sunday morning through nightfall, more than 50 rockets fired by militants from Gaza struck southern Israel. The first heavy barrage came as residents of this rocket-battered town near the Gaza border were getting up to go to work and school.
Around noon, to the north, a stray Syrian mortar shell hit an Israeli military post on the Israeli-held Golan Heights as Syrian government forces battled armed rebels on the other side of the Israeli-Syrian armistice line that has been in place for decades. It was the fourth time in just over a week that spillover from the Syrian civil war had crept toward Israel.
After years of relative quiet along the country’s borders, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu finds himself tested on two fronts. Under increasing pressure and with Israelis scheduled to go the polls in January, the nation’s leaders are talking tough and threatening broader action.
“The world needs to understand that Israel will not sit idly by in the face of attempts to attack us,” Mr. Netanyahu told his cabinet on Sunday morning. “We are prepared to intensify the response.”
Israeli defense officials have made it clear that Israel has no desire to get involved in the fighting in Syria. Israel already filed complaints with the United Nations observer force that monitors the armistice agreement reached between the Israeli and Syrian forces after the 1973 war, and the United Nations has warned that the spreading violence could jeopardize the cease-fire between the two countries.
“We hope they get the message this time,” Moshe Yaalon, Israel’s minister of strategic affairs, told Israeli television, referring to the missile fired at a Syrian mortar battery.
But while Israel views the fire from Syria as unintentional, though still unacceptable, the rockets from Gaza are deliberately aimed at population centers. Hamas, the Islamic militant group that controls the Palestinian coastal enclave, has claimed credit for participating in several recent rounds of rocket fire.
The latest surge began on Saturday when Palestinian militants fired an antitank missile at an Israeli military jeep patrolling Israel’s increasingly volatile border with Gaza, wounding four soldiers. Four Palestinian civilians were killed when Israel returned fire with tank or artillery shells, prompting new rocket fire against southern Israel. At least one Palestinian militant from a rocket-launching squad was killed in an Israeli airstrike.
Responding to years of rocket attacks, Israel carried out a three-week offensive against the militant groups in Gaza in the winter of 2008-9, resulting in an informal and shaky cease-fire. After three civilians were wounded by shrapnel in the Sderot area early Sunday morning, Silvan Shalom, a vice prime minister from Mr. Netanyahu’s conservative Likud Party, said that Israel was “not eager” to embark on another major ground operation in Gaza, but that the military was prepared to act. Yisrael Katz, another Likud minister, called for the liquidation of the Hamas leadership in Gaza and said that Israel should stop supplying the enclave with water, electricity, food and fuel.
In a statement, the defense minister, Ehud Barak, said that the military had been “evaluating a host of options for harsher responses against Hamas and the other terror organizations in Gaza” and that “it is Hamas that will pay the heavy price, a price that will be painful.”
In Sderot, residents were told to stay close to fortified rooms and bomb shelters. School was canceled. A factory in the industrial zone suffered a direct hit. Later, a rocket landed on a house with the residents inside, though they escaped injury.
“Israel could finish the whole story in one day,” said Shimon Biton, 75, who owns a hardware store in the market area. “It has the weapons and the intelligence. But our hands are bound, because America says ‘no.’ Gaza is packed with civilians, and the rockets are kept in their homes.”
Shulamit Amar, 40, said her 13-year-old son was terrified of the rockets, especially since one exploded in the yard behind their apartment block last year. “We raise our eyes to heaven,” she said. “Only God will help us.”
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