Israeli strike kills senior hardline Hamas leader

Israel killed a senior Hamas leader in an air attack on his home yesterday, striking its first deadly blow against the top ranks of the Islamist group in a Gaza offensive that has claimed more than 400 Palestinian lives.

Nizar Rayyan, a cleric widely regarded as one of Hamas's most hardline political leaders, had called for renewed suicide bombings inside Israel. Medical officials, confirming his death, said two of his four wives and seven of his children were killed in the bombing, in Jabalya refugee camp.

Hundreds of supporters scrambling over the concrete rubble vowed revenge as the mangled bodies, covered in blood and cement dust, were extracted from the wreckage.

"The blood of Sheikh Nizar Rayyan and the blood of other martyrs will never be wasted and the enemy will pay a heavy price for crimes it committed," said Hamas official Ayman Taha.

Black-bearded Rayyan, 49, was a preacher at Jabalya's "mosque of martyrs" who mentored suicide bombers. With a cartridge belt around his stocky frame, he would sometimes patrol the streets of Gaza with Hamas fighters.

Hamas Radio said he had ignored advice to leave his house as other Hamas leaders have done in anticipation of assassination attempts by Israeli forces, who also confirmed the air strike.

Israeli armoured forces remained massed on the Gaza frontier in preparation for a possible ground invasion as international calls for an immediate ceasefire mounted. "I think that even now, after a few days of operation we have achieved changes," Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said after talks in Paris with French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

"We affected most of the infrastructure of terror within the Gaza Strip and the question whether it's enough will be according to an assessment on a daily basis."

Ms Livni reiterated Israel's rejection of a French-proposed ceasefire of 48 hours to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza.

"There is no humanitarian crisis in the Strip, and therefore there is no need for a humanitarian truce," she said. "Israel has been supplying comprehensive humanitarian aid to the Strip... and has even been stepping this up by the day."

Seventy trucks carrying flour, cooking oil and other humanitarian supplies, including aid from Saudi Arabia, crossed into the Gaza Strip from Israel yesterday. But medics say their needs are acute, and power blackouts are increasing.

The deadliest conflict in the Gaza Strip in four decades has killed at least 410 Palestinians and wounded some 1,850. About a quarter of the dead were civilians, the UN estimates.