Israel Bombs Gaza Again..1 Feb.

An Israeli security official confirmed the attack, one of which was on an empty police station, on Sunday.

"The air force has carried out several strikes across the Gaza Strip," he said.

"We've said that if there is rocket fire against the south of the country, there will be a severe and disproportionate Israeli response to the fire on the citizens of Israel and its security forces," Olmert said on Sunday at the weekly cabinet meeting.

At least three rockets were fired into Israel from the Gaza Strip on Sunday, but caused no damage or injuries, police said.

Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, which is affiliated with the rival Fatah group, told Al Jazeera that it carried out the attacks.

"We condemn the statements by Olmert and others today threatening the Gaza Strip," Taher al-Nunu, a Hamas spokesman, said in a statement on Sunday.

"This is an attempt to find a false excuse to escalate the aggression against the Palestinians, to destroy the Egyptian efforts to improve the calm and to use pressure against the Palestinian people to accept Israeli conditions in those talks."

"Leadership by sending messages from safe places, to throw people to perdition while you are safe and your families are safe and settled, that is not responsible," Abbas said.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Sunday said that the continuing rockets attacks from the Gaza Strip were providing Israel with an excuse to attack the coastal territory.

In a speech at a Palestinian hospital in the Egyptian capital of Cairo, Abbas attacked Hamas for its conduct during the three-week conflict with Israel, accusing the Islamist group of irresponsible behavior and of carrying out "an agenda which is not Palestinian."

"Those people [Hamas leaders] gambled with the future of the people, they gambled with the blood of the people, the destiny of the people and the dream of the people," Abbas said

srael Air Force aircraft late Sunday bombed a Hamas security building in the central Gaza Strip and two other targets in the southern coastal territory, Palestinian witnesses said.

Witnesses in the central Gaza village of Mughraqa said a missile struck after dark in a cluster of caravans that served as a Hamas security headquarters.

They said the site had been evacuated, apparently after Israel telephoned warnings to Palestinians in Gaza to leave any buildings where weapons were located. The other two strikes were on suspected sites of tunnels along the border with Egypt