Media warns on Gaza bloodshed

JERUSALEM - Israeli media warned on Sunday that the bloody exchanges in and around Gaza which erupted after a deadly attack in southern Israel last week, risk spinning out of control, with nobody a winner.

The latest round of fighting was sparked by a series of coordinated attacks on Israeli cars and buses on a desert road near the Red Sea resort town of Eilat last Thursday which left eight people dead in an operation blamed on militants in Gaza.

Since Thursday, 15 Palestinians have been killed, nine of them militants, and 48 injured in Israeli strikes on Gaza.

And in Israel, one man has been killed and 18 injured as militants in Gaza have fired more than 100 rockets and mortar rounds at towns and cities in the south.

The Arab League on Sunday condemned Israeli air assaults on the Gaza Strip and said the United Nations must take action to end the attacks.

"We issued a statement condemning the Israeli offensive on Gaza ... and Egyptian land," Arab League Secretary-General Nabil Elaraby told reporters in Cairo.

"The United Nations has to take procedures to stop the Israeli offensive on Gaza," he said, without giving details of the measures he was urging the UN to take.

"Escalation" was the single-word headline splashed in red across the front page of the top-selling Yediot Aharonot, with veteran commentator Nahum Barnea warning there could be no winner in the latest spiral of violence.

"More and more civilians are getting hurt - both on our side and on the other side," he wrote. "Every death produces yet another escalation, and every escalation produces more deaths. Both sides are losing control."

The armed wing of the Islamist Hamas movement, which rules Gaza, also joined the fighting on Saturday, but it was "dragged into a battle it didn't want, a battle in which there is no victory," he added.

"The Israeli government isn't going to achieve victory in this battle either," he wrote.

Alex Fishman, writing in the same paper, warned of the diplomatic fallout which would be inevitable if Israel decided to embark upon a repeat of Operation Cast Lead, a devastating 22-day operation in Gaza over New Year 2009 which killed more than 1,400 Palestinians and 11 Israelis.

"Where do we go from here without getting into large-scale ground operations that will completely destroy our relations with Egypt and will persuade wavering countries not to support us in the UN vote about a Palestinian state in September?" he wrote, referring to Palestinian plans to seek UN membership next month.

AFP-Reuters