Clinton to Visit Israel in Effort to Defuse Gaza Conflict

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — President Obama sent Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to the Middle East on Tuesday to try to defuse the conflict in Gaza, the White House announced.

Jason Reed/Reuters

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and President Obama in Phnom Penh on Monday.

Mrs. Clinton, who accompanied Mr. Obama on his three-country Asia trip, left on her own plane immediately for the region, where she will stop first in Jerusalem to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, then head to the West Bank to meet with Palestinian leaders and finally to Cairo to consult with Egyptian officials.

The decision to dispatch Mrs. Clinton dramatically deepens the American involvement in the crisis. Mr. Obama, on an Asian tour, made a number of late-night phone calls to the Middle East on Monday night that contributed to his conclusion that he had to become more engaged and that Mrs. Clinton might be able to accomplish something.

With the United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon also scheduled to arrive in Israel on Tuesday, a senior official in the prime minister’s office said Israel decided to give more time to diplomacy before launching a ground invasion into Gaza. But Israel has not withdrawn other options.

“I prefer a diplomatic solution. I hope that we can get one but if not, we have every right to defend ourselves with other means and we shall use them,” Prime Minister Netanyahu said in a statement at the start of a meeting in Jerusalem with German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle.

“As you know, we seek a diplomatic unwinding to this, through the discussions of cease-fire,” Mr. Netanyahu added. “But if the firing continues we will have to take broader action, and we won’t hesitate to do so.”

The Health Ministry in Gaza said the death toll had climbed by late Tuesday morning to 112, roughly half of them civilians and including children. Three Israelis died in a rocket attack last week.After an Asian summit dinner in Phnom Penh on Monday night, Mr. Obama called President Mohamed Morsi of Egypt to discuss the situation, then spoke with Mr. Netanyahu and called Mr. Morsi back. He was up until 2:30 a.m. on the phone, the White House said. He consulted with Mrs. Clinton repeatedly on the sidelines of the Asian summit meetings on Tuesday.

“This morning, Secretary Clinton and the president spoke again about the situation in Gaza and the they agreed that it makes sense for the secretary to travel to the region so Secretary Clinton will depart today,” said Benjamin Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser to Mr. Obama. “Her visits will build on the engagement that we’ve undertaken in the last several days.”

Mr. Rhodes said that “any resolution to this has to include an end to that rocket fire” by Hamas militants on Israeli communities but “the best way to solve this is through diplomacy.”

He added: “It’s in nobody’s interest to see an escalation of the military conflict.”

Mrs. Clinton will not meet with Hamas representatives on her trip, but with leaders of the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank, which is at odds with the Hamas rulers of the Gaza Strip. “We do not engage directly with Hamas,” Mr. Rhodes said.

Instead, Mr. Obama is focused on leveraging Egypt’s influence with Hamas to press for a halt to the rocket attacks. “We believe Egypt can and should be a partner in achieving that outcome,” Mr. Rhodes said.

Mr. Rhodes reaffirmed that the United States supports Israel’s right to defend itself and said Mr. Obama did not ask Mr. Netanyahu to hold off a ground incursion into Gaza.

In Jerusalem, an official in the prime minister’s office said that the country’s top nine ministers, who make up the inner security cabinet, held discussions late into the night on the state of the diplomatic efforts and Israel’s military operation in Gaza. The goal of the operation, Israel says, is to end years of rocket fire by Gaza militants against southern Israel.

Egypt has been brokering efforts, with American involvement, for a cease-fire. “What is on the table is not there yet. It does not bring about what we need,” the official said, referring to Israel’s demands for an end to the threat of rocket fire.

Gaza militants fired more than 70 rockets in heavy barrages at southern Israel on Tuesday morning and 8 of them struck in densely populated areas.

Peter Baker reported from Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem. Jodi Rudoren contributed reporting from Gaza City.

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Ashton Kutcher & Mila Kunis Share Romantic (and Rainy) Night in Rome

By Maggie Coughlan

11/20/2012 at 07:45 AM EST

Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis

XPosure

Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis have taken their romance (and appetites) to the Eternal City.

Shielded by a large umbrella, on Sunday the couple was photographed leaving Antica Pesa restaurant in Rome. (Kunis is in town to shoot her new movie, The Third Person.)

At dinner, the pair ordered a number of the restaurant's specialties, including Parma ham crudo and mozzarella, eggplant parmigiana, mini beef sliders, pasta with chickpeas, a salad with marinated anchovies and much more. They also saved room for dessert: a thousand layer pastry with cream and fresh berries. And the couple washed down their meal with a bottle of red wine.

While in Rome, the two have also been spotted taking evening strolls and holding hands in the cobblestone streets in the center of Rome and sightseeing.

The Rome visit has been just another romantic rendezvous for the couple who have been spotted doing everything from spoon feeding each other to relaxing with foot massages all over the world.

Most recently, Kutcher, 34, and Kunis, 29, visited Sydney, Australia together.

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New push for most in US to get at least 1 HIV test

WASHINGTON (AP) — There's a new push to make testing for the AIDS virus as common as cholesterol checks.

Americans ages 15 to 64 should get an HIV test at least once — not just people considered at high risk for the virus, an independent panel that sets screening guidelines proposed Monday.

The draft guidelines from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force are the latest recommendations that aim to make HIV screening simply a routine part of a check-up, something a doctor can order with as little fuss as a cholesterol test or a mammogram. Since 2006, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also has pushed for widespread, routine HIV screening.

Yet not nearly enough people have heeded that call: Of the more than 1.1 million Americans living with HIV, nearly 1 in 5 — almost 240,000 people — don't know it. Not only is their own health at risk without treatment, they could unwittingly be spreading the virus to others.

The updated guidelines will bring this long-simmering issue before doctors and their patients again — emphasizing that public health experts agree on how important it is to test even people who don't think they're at risk, because they could be.

"It allows you to say, 'This is a recommended test that we believe everybody should have. We're not singling you out in any way,'" said task force member Dr. Douglas Owens of Stanford University and the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System.

And if finalized, the task force guidelines could extend the number of people eligible for an HIV screening without a copay in their doctor's office, as part of free preventive care under the Obama administration's health care law. Under the task force's previous guidelines, only people at increased risk for HIV — which includes gay and bisexual men and injecting drug users — were eligible for that no-copay screening.

There are a number of ways to get tested. If you're having blood drawn for other exams, the doctor can merely add HIV to the list, no extra pokes or swabs needed. Today's rapid tests can cost less than $20 and require just rubbing a swab over the gums, with results ready in as little as 20 minutes. Last summer, the government approved a do-it-yourself at-home version that's selling for about $40.

Free testing is available through various community programs around the country, including a CDC pilot program in drugstores in 24 cities and rural sites.

Monday's proposal also recommends:

—Testing people older and younger than 15-64 if they are at increased risk of HIV infection,

—People at very high risk for HIV infection should be tested at least annually.

—It's not clear how often to retest people at somewhat increased risk, but perhaps every three to five years.

—Women should be tested during each pregnancy, something the task force has long recommended.

The draft guidelines are open for public comment through Dec. 17.

Most of the 50,000 new HIV infections in the U.S. every year are among gay and bisexual men, followed by heterosexual black women.

"We are not doing as well in America with HIV testing as we would like," Dr. Jonathan Mermin, CDC's HIV prevention chief, said Monday.

The CDC recommends at least one routine test for everyone ages 13 to 64, starting two years younger than the task force recommended. That small difference aside, CDC data suggests fewer than half of adults under 65 have been tested.

"It can sometimes be awkward to ask your doctor for an HIV test," Mermin said — the reason that making it routine during any health care encounter could help.

But even though nearly three-fourths of gay and bisexual men with undiagnosed HIV had visited some sort of health provider in the previous year, 48 percent weren't tested for HIV, a recent CDC survey found. Emergency rooms are considered a good spot to catch the undiagnosed, after their illnesses and injuries have been treated, but Mermin said only about 2 percent of ER patients known to be at increased risk were tested while there.

Mermin calls that "a tragedy. It's a missed opportunity."

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4 held in alleged terror plot

Men with Southland ties sought to join Al Qaeda and harm Americans, FBI says.

Four men with ties to Southern California have been charged with plotting to join Al Qaeda and the Taliban to commit "violent jihad" and target Americans, the FBI said Monday night.

One of the men, Sohiel Omar Kabir, 34, allegedly traveled in July to Afghanistan, where he arranged for terrorist training to be conducted with Al Qaeda and Taliban operatives, according to a complaint unsealed Monday in U.S. District Court in Riverside.

Kabir, who lived in Pomona, is a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Afghanistan, federal authorities said.

In 2010, Kabir allegedly introduced Ontario resident Ralph Deleon, 23, and Upland resident Miguel Alejandro Santana, 21, to "radical and violent Islamic doctrine," according to the complaint.

"Kabir influenced Santana and Deleon to convert to Islam," the complaint said.

Kabir and Santana allegedly posted terrorist audio and video files on their Facebook pages and communicated via Skype when Kabir was overseas, according to federal authorities.

The complaint said the men studied Internet essays and lectures by Anwar Awlaki, a radical Muslim cleric and U.S. citizen killed in Yemen in 2011 by missiles fired from a U.S. Predator drone aircraft. The death of Awlaki, a mid-level Al Qaeda operative, was considered a major coup because he had been effective in reaching disaffected Muslims in the U.S. and elsewhere with his online speeches and sermons.

Santana is accused of posting audio files of Awlaki on a social media site, the complaint alleges.

After arriving in Afghanistan, Kabir told the two men he had arranged for them to travel to that country for terrorist training, the complaint alleged.

Santana and Deleon are accused of telling a confidential source working for the FBI that they planned to go to Afghanistan to take part in "violent jihad," the complaint said. Santana is a permanent resident born in Mexico, authorities said, and Deleon is a permanent resident born in the Philippines.

The confidential source was paid more than $250,000 in October by the federal government and received unspecified "immigration benefits," according to a footnote in the criminal complaint. The source was previously convicted of trafficking in pseudoephedrine.

In September, Santana and Deleon recruited Arifeen David Gojali, 21, of Riverside to travel overseas with them and join Kabir for terrorist training, according to federal authorities. Gojali is a U.S. citizen.

Santana, Gojali and Deleon were apprehended Friday by authorities with the Joint Terrorism Task Force. They appeared before a magistrate Monday in federal court in Riverside.

Kabir was taken into custody in Afghanistan.

The investigation is ongoing. If convicted, the men each face up to 15 years in federal prison.

robert.lopez@latimes.com

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Palestinian Death Toll Rises as Israel Presses Onslaught

GAZA CITY — After a night of sustained Israeli strikes by air and sea and a morning of rocket attacks on Israel, the Health Ministry here said on Monday the Palestinian death toll in six days of conflict had risen to 91 with 700 wounded, including 200 children as the assault ground on unrelentingly despite efforts toward a ceasefire.

The casualties — 19 people reported killed since midnight local time — included Palestinians killed in strikes by warplanes and a drone attack on two men on a motorcycle. Another drone attack killed the driver of a taxi hired by journalists and displaying ‘Press” signs, although it was not clear which journalists hired it, Palestinian officials said. On Sunday, Israeli forces attacked two buildings housing local broadcasters and production companies used by foreign outlets, but Israeli officials denied targeting journalists.

An Israeli bomb pummeled a home deep into the ground here on Sunday, killing 11 people, including nine in three generations of a single family, in the deadliest single strike in six days of cross-border conflict. Members of the fanily were buried Monday in a rite that turned into a gesture of defiance and a rally supporting Gaza’s militant Hamas rulers. A militant leader said Tel Aviv in the Israeli heartland would be hit “over and over” and warned Israelis that their leaders were misleading them and would “take them to hell.”

The airstrikes further indicated that Israel was striking a wide range of targets. Three Israelis have been killed and at least 79 wounded by continued rocket fire into southern Israel and as far north as Tel Aviv.

Israel says its onslaught is designed to stop Hamas launching the rockets but, after an apparent lull overnight, more missiles hurtled toward targets in Israel, some of them intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome defense system. Of five rockets fired on Monday at the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon, four were intercepted but one smashed through the concrete roof at the entrance to an empty school. There were no reports of casualties. Other rockets rained on areas along the border with Gaza. 

Later a second volley struck Ashkelon. Several rockets were intercepted but one crashed down onto a house causing damage but no casualties.

On Sunday, a new blitz of Palestinian rockets totaled nearly 100 by nightfall, including two that soared toward the population center of Tel Aviv but were knocked out of the sky by Israeli defenses.

In a statement on Monday, the Israel Defense Forces said overnight targets included “underground rocket launchers, terror tunnels, training bases, Hamas command posts and weapon storage facilities.” But news reports said the strikes flattened two houses belonging to a single family, killing two children and two adults and injuring 42 people, while a shrapnel burst from another attack killed one child and wounded others living near the rubble of the former national security compound.

The latest exchanges offered a grim backdrop to Egyptian-led cease-fire efforts that have so far proved inconclusive. United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was set to join the effort in Cairo on Monday.

Brig. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, the spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces, said there had been a reduction of up to 40 percent in rocket fire from Gaza, while Israeli forces had launched 40 attacks on tunnels between Egypt and Gaza, both at the entrances and along the road leading to them, causing considerable damage.

He said six rocket launching teams and two men on motorcycles were hit while the Israeli forces continued to intercept Palestinian radio signals to urge Gaza residents to steer clear of activists.

In the Israeli strike on Sunday morning, it took emergency workers and a Caterpillar digger more than an hour to reveal the extent of the devastation under the two-story home of Jamal Dalu, a shop owner. Mr. Dalu was at a neighbor’s when the blast wiped out nearly his entire family: His sister, wife, two daughters, daughter-in-law and four grandchildren ages 2 to 6 all perished under the rubble, along with two neighbors, an 18-year-old and his grandmother.

“We were asleep and then there was a terrific blast,” said Abdul-Latif Dahman, who lives nearby and was among more than 100 who stood vigil as the bodies were dug out. “There are no words to describe what happened later, only smoke and dust and heavy silence because the sound shut our ears.”

The smell of bomb residue and the roars of bulldozers filled the air as people clambered over shattered glass and bent iron bars to get a closer look. When two tiny bodies were finally found, rescuers and residents erupted in cries of “God is great!” One worker rushed the girl to an ambulance, while a neighbor grabbed the boy and just ran.

Ismail Haniyeh, the prime minister of the militant Hamas faction that rules Gaza, condemned the attack as a “massacre” that “exceeded all expectations.”

General Mordechai, the spokesman for the Israeli military, said it was “examining the event.”

Fares Akram and Jodi Rudoren reported from Gaza City, and Alan Cowell from London. Reporting was contributed by Isabel Kershner from Ashkelon, Israel; Ethan Bronner, Myra Noveck and Irit Pazner Garshowitz from Jerusalem; Rina Castelnuovo from Ashdod, Israel; Peter Baker from Bangkok; and David D. Kirkpatrick from Cairo.

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Online gaming firms urge EU to open up markets

LONDON (Reuters) – Online gaming companies have accused Belgium and Greece of keeping them out of their markets illegally and urged European competition authorities to take action.

A long-running dispute over licenses in Belgium made headlines last week when Belgian authorities questioned one of the co-chief executives of bwin.party, the world’s largest listed online gaming group.

The bwin.party case has underlined the problems faced by companies in the growing online gaming sector when they operate in countries where regulations are unclear or restrictive.

Bwin.party says it is losing 700,000 euros ($ 889,400) in gaming revenue each month after access to its websites was blocked in Belgium.

Executives from 12 gaming companies including bwin.party said the European Commission had failed to follow through on concerns over Belgian laws first raised in 2009.

“We hope that the Commission will now enforce compliance with the European treaty and do so swiftly,” they said in a letter to the Financial Times.

“Countries such as Belgium and Greece that are in clear breach of EU law and that are seeking to enforce those laws domestically are likely to be at the top of the list,” it added.

“The time for polite rhetoric is now over. It is time for deeds not words.”

Belgian rules state that a company must offer the same services both online and offline to obtain a license. Opponents say that favors companies based in Belgium and means pure online providers cannot operate.

In Greece, bookmakers including Britain’s William Hill launched a legal challenge to monopoly operator OPAP after being denied licenses.

(Writing by Keith Weir; Editing by Tom Pfeiffer)

Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Peta Murgatroyd Blogs: Dancing with the Stars Elimination Left Gilles a 'Bit Devastated'

Only on People.com

By Peta Murgatroyd

11/19/2012 at 07:45 AM EST

Peta Murgatroyd and Gilles Marini

Craig Sjodin/ABC

Peta Murgatroyd is a former Dancing with the Stars champion, winning the coveted mirror-ball trophy in season 14 – only her second season on the series – with Donald Driver. The Australia native blogged for PEOPLE.com about competing with Gilles Marini in the current all-star season. The pair was eliminated during Week 8. Murgatroyd has written her final post.

Elimination is always a little disappointing. Gilles [Marini] really wanted to win badly and he was a bit devastated that he got cut. But he's cool with it now. He's okay. I don't think he expected it. He worked really hard and he's the type of person who believes if you work hard, you get results. But it's not always the case with this TV show. Everyone works hard and everyone was amazing. It was such a tough competition, and I believe we were very lucky to have gotten that far.

It's just more heartbreaking because we had ideas for the next week. We were excited to get started on new things. It's just not going to happen, but we both have other things to look forward to now.

Gilles had the talent to make it to that final. He is an absolutely amazing dancer. But the show is about votes, and that's what really killed us in the end.

Gilles and I definitely bonded over this period. We've become very close friends and I'm become friendly with his wife Carole and his children. We're going to stay in touch and think about work ventures together. He's got great stuff ahead of him. He's an amazing person and I've definitely learned a few lessons from him. He's taught me a few things about life.

I love that we get different partners. You walk away from these relationships staying friends, but also learning about each other and about life. It's one of the best things about the show.

Right now I feel great. I'm a little tired from New York because I just flew in, but it was fun. I met up with a few friends when I got in, and then Gilles and I did the foxtrot together on The View. I stayed a few days extra to catch up with friends and Gilles went home. The View was fun.

I pigged out in New York. I had bagels with cream cheese, gelato and some pizza. I kind of hit all the food groups, which is something I usually don't allow myself to do. I have everything in moderation, but I really splurged over there and it felt good. I don't feel guilty about it at all. I'm going straight back to the gym.

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EU drug regulator OKs Novartis' meningitis B shot

LONDON (AP) — Europe's top drug regulator has recommended approval for the first vaccine against meningitis B, made by Novartis AG.

There are five types of bacterial meningitis. While vaccines exist to protect against the other four, none has previously been licensed for type B meningitis. In Europe, type B is the most common, causing 3,000 to 5,000 cases every year.

Meningitis mainly affects infants and children. It kills about 8 percent of patients and leaves others with lifelong consequences such as brain damage.

In a statement on Friday, Andrin Oswald of Novartis said he is "proud of the major advance" the company has made in developing its vaccine Bexsero. It is aimed at children over two months of age, and Novartis is hoping countries will include the shot among the routine ones for childhood diseases such as measles.

Novartis said the immunization has had side effects such as fever and redness at the injection site.

Recommendations from the European Medicines Agency are usually adopted by the European Commission. Novartis also is seeking to test the vaccine in the U.S.

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Sikh religion joining California universities' curriculum

SANTA CRUZ — The first slide professor Nirvikar Singh flashed on his PowerPoint showed the faces of six Sikh worshipers gunned down the previous month in Oak Creek, Wis., by a man with white supremacist ties.

As after other attacks since 9/11, the UC Santa Cruz professor explained to students in this fall introductory course, the Wisconsin shooting revealed an abiding ignorance over who Sikhs are — and aren't.

"Despite being in this country for more than 100 years, I think Sikhs are not well understood," said Singh, a 58-year-old economist, dressed in jeans and a midnight blue turban.

Singh holds the university's nascent chair in Sikh and Punjabi studies — the fourth of its kind in California and part of a broader movement to spread the word about the world's fifth-largest religion while promoting scholarship.

For students like David Villalobos, the course offered a chance "to get to know a culture I know nothing about." Guneet Kaur, who along with about a third of Singh's three dozen students is of Sikh heritage, craved the perspective of non-Sikhs and a "sounding board" on the Oak Creek temple massacre.

Like those at UC Santa Barbara, UC Riverside and Cal State East Bay, the program was launched with an endowment from a Sikh family honoring a relative. It comes at a time of promising developments in the community's struggle for exposure.

Efforts to include basics on Sikh history, religion and political struggle in California's K-12 curriculum are moving forward after years of delay. Embracing a legislative declaration of November as "California Sikh Awareness and Appreciation Month," Supt. of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson has recommended instructional materials and attended outreach events.

Meanwhile, California is enacting the nation's strongest workplace religious freedom law, barring employers from rejecting religious accommodation unless they can prove doing so would impose "significant difficulty or expense." Sponsored by the nonprofit Sikh Coalition, it is expected to loosen prohibitions on such Sikh articles of faith as unshorn hair and carrying a kirpan — a small sword that represents self-reliance and readiness to defend the oppressed.

The changes come as Stockton's gurdwara — the oldest and for decades only Sikh temple in the United States — celebrates its centennial and as statewide conferences on Sikh history, religion, art and music proliferate.

"The tide is turning," said Bruce La Brack, a professor emeritus in cultural anthropology at Stockton's University of the Pacific, who began studying California Sikhs in Yuba City nearly 40 years ago.

::

Rooted in the Punjab region of the Indian subcontinent, Sikhism was founded by the 15th century Guru Nanak on tenets of monotheism, egalitarianism and community service.

The tenth and final guru, Gobind Singh, deemed the Sikh sacred scripture to be his eternal successor, and the voluminous text known as the Guru Granth Sahib became the focus of religious life.

In the late 19th century, Sikhs first migrated to British Columbia and then California, where men worked the railroads before turning to peach and almond farming. Discrimination and misconception were ever present.

Today there are an estimated 600,000 Sikhs in the United States, about 250,000 in California, said La Brack. The largest community is in the Bay Area, where Sikhs have thrived in Silicon Valley and built six gurdwaras — among them a $20-million facility in San Jose that accommodates 10,000 worshipers.

Although most Sikhs focused on faith and family, an entrepreneur known as the father of fiber optics launched the philanthropic Sikh Foundation in Palo Alto in 1967 to broadly promote Sikh culture. By 1999, Narinder Singh Kapany had dedicated a gallery of Sikh works at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and endowed the first university chair, at UC Santa Barbara.

"I felt that the Sikh culture needed to be understood in the U.S., and also by the Sikh youth," he said in a recent interview.

Kapany, 85, matched donors with three more California universities. The endowment for the Santa Cruz chair, launched last year, came from a San Antonio family in honor of their son, Sarabjit Singh Aurora, an engineer who had died of cancer.

"He was always very keen to educate kids in the schools about Sikhism," said his sister, Arvinder Kaur Aurora, 42.

The need for mainstream education, she and others note, became more pronounced after 9/11. Mistaken for Muslims because of their turbans, Sikhs were targeted. Among them was an Arizona gas station attendant killed by a self-proclaimed "patriot" who had vowed to shoot some "towel heads."

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Arms With a Long Reach Help Hamas

TEL AVIV — When Israel assassinated the top Hamas military commander in Gaza on Wednesday, setting off the current round of fierce fighting, it was aiming not just at a Palestinian leader but at a supply line of rockets from Iran that have for the first time given Hamas the ability to strike as far as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

The commander, Ahmed al-Jabari, had shifted Hamas’s low-grade militia into a disciplined force with sophisticated weapons like Fajr-5 rockets, which are named after the Persian word for dawn and have significantly increased the danger to Israel’s major cities. They have a range of about 45 miles and are fired by trained crews from underground launching pads.

Hamas had perhaps 100 of them until the Israeli attacks last week, which appear to have destroyed most of the stockpile. The rockets are assembled locally after being shipped from Iran to Sudan, trucked across the desert through Egypt, broken down into parts and moved through Sinai tunnels into Gaza, according to senior Israeli security officials.

The smuggling route involves salaried employees from Hamas along the way, Iranian technical experts traveling on forged passports and government approval in Sudan, Israeli officials said.

Mr. Jabari’s strategy has been so effective and alarming for Israel that it is preparing for a possible next stage in the four-day-old battle: a ground war in which its troops would seek to destroy remaining rocket launching bases and crews and munitions factories.

Under Mr. Jabari, Hamas also developed its own weapons industry in Gaza, building long-range rockets as well as drones that they hoped to fly over Israel just as Israeli drones roam the skies of Gaza, sowing fear in its population.

The current operation to eliminate the Hamas rocket launchers could serve to cripple the ability of Iran’s allies in Gaza from retaliating should Israel ever carry out its threat to attack Iranian nuclear facilities.

“Both Hamas and Islamic Jihad are building weapons with experts from Iran,” one top security official said Saturday, speaking on condition of anonymity. “What we took care of last night was their own production facility for U.A.V.’s,” he added, referring to unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones. “This was all the work of Jabari, who was a very sophisticated and strategic thinker.”

A number of recent Israeli military attacks were aimed at cutting the supply chain into Gaza. In late October, a munitions factory in Sudan was hit from the air. Israel did not acknowledge carrying out the attack, but the winks and nods of officials here make clear that it did. Israel has carried out several other such attacks on Sudan, including on convoys, in the past few years.

In addition, Mossad agents killed a Hamas official in a Dubai hotel in early 2010 because he was thought to be crucial to the Hamas supply chain of weapons and rockets into Gaza.

One official here said that until Israel ended its military occupation of Gaza in 2005, there were only primitive weapons factories there. The Hamas rockets had a flight capacity of about a mile, they could not be aimed and they flew in a wild cylindrical pattern. Hamas then built better rockets that could fly up to 12 miles.

That changed little until 2007, when Hamas fighters pushed the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority out of Gaza into the West Bank and took over governing the coastal strip.

“At that point, Jabari turned his neighborhood defense operation into a real army,” said a retired Israeli general whose portfolio included Gaza and who spoke on condition of anonymity. “He organized what was a militia into companies, battalions and brigades. He sent commanders to Syria and to Iran to be trained by the Revolutionary Guards. And then he built up this whole new branch to develop military technology focusing on long-range missiles.”

The collapse of the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya last year created other supply options for Hamas as Libyan military storehouses were raided and the equipment sold off. Those weapons were driven across Egypt and into Gaza.

It remains to be seen whether Mr. Jabari’s death will truly cripple Hamas, or whether it will find someone equally adept to take his place, the officials said.

Either way, Hamas now has a range of rockets and weapons in its arsenal, said Jeffrey White, a former analyst with the United States Defense Intelligence Agency and now a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

In addition to the Fajr-5, Hamas has a few hundred of what are known as enhanced Grad rockets, which have a range of about 25 miles. The Grads are 122-millimeter rockets that have bigger warheads than the standard Grads, but their accuracy is relatively low. The Grads may also be coming from Iran, Mr. White said, but others are made in Gaza and imported from Libya.

In addition, Hamas has hundreds of standard Grads that have a range of about 12 miles, as well as thousands of homemade mortars and Qassam rockets with a range of about six miles.

Israeli officials said the movement of the Fajr-5 rockets through Egypt could not go unnoticed there, given their size. Each is 20 feet long and weighs more than 2,000 pounds — the warhead alone weighs 375 pounds — and the trucks carrying them across Egyptian bridges and through roadblocks into Sinai would be hard to miss.

In the current conflict, Israel’s antirocket system, known as Iron Dome, has been more effective than expected, but still dozens of rockets have landed.

Whether the military operation against Gaza is a dress rehearsal for any future attack on either Iran or Lebanon — where Hezbollah has thousands of rockets pointed at Israel — is a matter under debate here. Some see it as clearing away any possible trouble from Gaza. Others say that makes little sense, given the difference of scale in the conflict in Gaza and any war against Iran or Hezbollah. Hamas’s arsenal is tiny compared with what Hezbollah in Lebanon is thought to have: thousands of rockets capable of hitting Tel Aviv.

Yonatan Touval, an analyst with Prime Source, a private Tel Aviv risk-assessment company, said, “The Iron Dome system is ineffective in intercepting longer-range projectiles, such as those that would be launched from Lebanon toward the Tel Aviv area. To address this threat, Israel is currently developing the Magic Wand system, but it is not expected to become operational before 2015.”

He added that the fighting now was therefore not really a test of a future conflict involving Iran and Lebanon. “If Israel’s political leadership is treating the current operation in Gaza as something of a rehearsal for a future war with Hezbollah and Iran, it is rehearsing the wrong play,” he said.

Michael R. Gordon contributed reporting from Washington.

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