Israel Warns, Gazans Panic

GAZA CITY — The man with the Israeli accent called Omar Mamluke on his cellphone just before midnight and asked for him by name.

"You have just a few minutes to get out of the house," he said. An Israeli missile was about to hit.

"I asked if he was joking, and he told me: 'The Israeli Defense Forces don't joke,' " Mamluke recalled.

The police officer and former Palestinian steeplechase champion wasted no time; he'd heard what happened to others in Gaza who'd received such calls.

He gathered up his two wives and 15 children, and they ran out of the house in their nightclothes, yelling for their neighbors to do the same.

The missile struck within half an hour, lifting Mamluke's house in the air, sending the foundation columns across the street. But no one was hurt, which the Israeli army says is the point of such phone calls.

The Israeli military, which launched campaigns in both the Gaza Strip and Lebanon after its soldiers were captured in border incursions, says it does its best to warn civilians of impending military action. Its warnings to civilians to leave southern Lebanon are at the center of controversy over the airstrike early Sunday in the Lebanese village of Qana that killed almost 60 people, most of them women and children.

Although many people have fled southern Lebanon, some say they are afraid to travel roads that have been bombed by Israeli planes. The sick or injured, the very young and the old sometimes can't travel, the Lebanese say.

Israeli officials have suggested that, after several warnings, those who remain behind are responsible for their own fate. "Those who stay have apparently decided to take the risk, or are being held by Hezbollah, which has accepted the risk on their behalf," Brig. Gen. Alon Friedman, deputy head of the Israeli army's northern command headquarters, said last week. "We have no intention of hitting innocent civilians and will do all possible to avoid harming them, but the fighting has a price."

In Gaza, where the Israeli military began issuing specific warnings in the last two weeks, the practice has not won over many hearts or minds.

Few here accept the idea that Israel, even for public relations reasons, really is trying to limit civilian deaths.

At best, residents decry it as a cynical attempt to portray Israel's military campaigns in a better light. Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh calls it a form of psychological warfare.