Israeli PM Olmert may send army to topple Hamas in Gaza

WASHINGTON, Dec. 30 (UPI) -- Israel stepped up its bombing campaign against major Hamas centers in Gaza Tuesday as prospects grew that heavy ground forces might be sent in to topple the extreme Islamist regime there.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert described the intense air bombardment -- the heaviest Israel has taken against any targets in Gaza since the 1967 Six Day War 41 years ago, as only "the first of several stages" of military action. That raised the possibility that the Israelis might send in heavy ground forces to complete the job of either wiping out Hamas or forcing its cadres to flee Gaza, where they violently seized power in 2007.

"The government is determined to remove the threat of fire on the south. Therefore the Israeli army must not stop the operation before breaking the will of Palestinians, of Hamas, to continue to fire at Israel," Olmert said Tuesday at a discussion with Israeli President Shimon Peres.

According to U.N. estimates, 290 Hamas officials or troops and another 60 civilians have been killed so far. The Israelis continued to target Hamas installations including an office complex. The Israeli navy massed warships to cut off Gaza from the sea. Reports said electric power had been lost in Gaza, where 1.4 million people live.

Hamas fired another 10 rockets into Israel injuring one person in the development town of Sderot, which has been targeted by Hamas rockets over the past year and a half.

Israeli Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit said on Israel Radio Tuesday: "There is no room for a cease-fire."

The Israeli airstrikes entered their fourth day with no indication that they were either decreasing in intensity or would stop soon. It remained unclear -- apparently as a deliberate act of Israeli policy -- whether Israel would limit itself to airstrikes or would escalate to a full-scale ground invasion.

Israel too would suffer significant military casualties in any major ground operations to oust Hamas from control of the Gaza Strip, one of the most densely populated urban enclaves on Earth. However, the Israeli army has had more successful experience of urban war than any other army in the world in recent decades.

But Israel is operating within very clear time constraints. U.S. President George W. Bush remains strongly sympathetic to it and so far has made no real effort to rein the Israelis in. But on Jan. 20 Bush will hand over power to President-elect Barack Obama, who is far more likely to force the Israelis to halt military operations if they are still engaging in them.

The scandal-plagued Olmert must step down whoever wins the Israeli general election on Feb. 10. His foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, now leads his ruling Kadima Party, and his defense minister, former Chief of Staff retired Lt. Gen. Ehud Barak, leads the Labor Party. Barak and Labor were trailing badly in polls before the incursion into Gaza began.

Olmert, Livni and Barak had all taken heavy criticism for not acting sooner to stop the escalating Hamas rocket attacks. Opposition Likud Party leader and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been leading strongly in opinion polls and continues to argue strongly that Hamas must be driven out of Gaza. Netanyahu also supports the current military operations against Hamas. That means Olmert -- the most unpopular Israeli prime minister in the country's history according to opinion polls over the past two and a half years -- actually enjoys a wall-to-wall popular consensus for the current military operations.

However, anything less than driving Hamas from power in Gaza will be a major defeat for Olmert and his political partners Livni and Barak. And as long as Hamas manages to stay in power in Gaza, however heavy the civilian casualties there are, it will emerge vastly strengthened if it can boast of defying the Israeli army.

That would make it an even more serious threat to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank and to King Abdullah II of Jordan. Hamas has targeted both regimes in its drive to encircle Israel with extreme jihadist regimes before launching a final drive to destroy the Jewish state.

Even if Israel succeeds in driving Hamas out of Gaza, it is by no means clear what it would do with Gaza afterwards. The Israeli army would suffer significant and probably growing casualties if it attempted to impose a full-scale military occupation on Gaza, but the Palestinian Authority/Fatah regime of Abbas proved enormously corrupt, incompetent and unable to maintain effective control during its years of rule there.

Israel withdrew its last military forces from Gaza in August 2005, but the Palestinian Authority and Fatah proved unable to maintain control there and were violently ousted by Hamas in 2007.