Conflict spills into streets of Israeli cities,

Mob violence between Jews, Arabs comes as missiles, rockets fill skies

JERUSALEM—A new front opened in the military showdown between the Israeli army and Palestinian militants in Gaza on Wednesday as a wave of mob violence between Jews and Arabs spread across several Israeli cities, leading to riots and attacks in the streets as rockets and missiles streaked across the sky.

Israel said it assassinated 10 senior militants and continued to pound both military and residential areas across the Gaza Strip with airstrikes, while Hamas, the Islamist group that rules Gaza, and its allies continued to fire rockets into civilian areas across central and southern Israel.

More than 1,000 rockets had been fired from Gaza by Wednesday night, most of them intercepted by an antimissile defence system, the Israeli military said.

More than 67 Palestinians, including 16 children, have died since the start of the conflict on Monday, Palestinian health officials said. The rockets fired by Hamas and its ally, the Islamic Jihad militant group, killed at least six Israeli civilians, including a five-year-old boy, and one soldier.

But the most unexpected developments occurred on the streets of Israeli cities and towns, as rival Jewish and Arab mobs attacked people, cars, shops, offices and hotels.

One of the most chilling incidents occurred in Bat Yam, a seaside suburb south of Tel Aviv, where dozens of Jewish extremists took turns beating and kicking an Arab driver, even as his body lay motionless on the ground.

Another occurred in Acre, a northern coastal town, where an Arab mob beat a Jewish man with sticks and rocks, also leaving him in a critical condition. A third was in nearby Tamra, where an Arab mob nearly stabbed a Jewish man to death.

Israeli officials said they had “locked down” the city of Lod in central Israel, the first time such an action has been taken in decades, and arrested 280 people accused of rioting across the country.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the violence as “anarchy” and convened an emergency cabinet meeting that lasted into the early hours of Thursday to “give more powers to the police” and enforce curfews “as needed.”

The sudden turn of events, which in less than two days escalated from a localized dispute in Jerusalem to full-scale aerial war over Gaza to widespread civil unrest, shocked Israelis and Palestinians alike and left some of the country’s most experienced leaders fearing that the decades-old Israel-Palestinian conflict was heading into new territory.

For years, leaders warned that a failure to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict might eventually lead to fighting within the state of Israel itself, said Tzipi Livni, a veteran former cabinet minister and former chief negotiator in peace talks with the Palestinians.

“I don’t want to use the words ‘civil war’,” she added. “But this is something that is new, this is unbearable, this is horrific, and I’m very worried.”

Speaking to reporters, U.S. President Joe Biden said that he had spoken “for a while” to Netanyahu on Wednesday and said his expectation was that tensions would be “closing down sooner rather than later.” Biden added that “Israel has a right to defend itself, when you have thousands of rockets flying into your territory.”

Officials in several Arab countries, including some that had normalized relations with Israel, criticized its actions. Saudi Arabia, which has not normalized relations with Israel, condemned “in the strongest terms the blatant attacks carried out by the Israeli occupation forces against the sanctity of the AlAqsa Mosque.”

In the central city of Lod, the government declared a state of emergency early Wednesday after a synagogue, school and several vehicles were burned by Arab rioters on Monday and Tuesday nights.

In the cities of Or Akiva and Beersheva, Jews stoned the cars of people they believed to be Arab. In Tiberias, they threw rocks at hotels housing Arabs, who hurled objects from their windows in return. Cars were set on fire in several towns. And an Arab mob in Haifa ransacked a Jewish-owned hotel.

“It’s happening as we speak,” the hotel’s owner, Evan Fallenberg, said by phone Wednesday night.

“People are saying this is a rupture that we won’t be able to overcome. I don’t believe that — I know my friendships are lasting ones. But it is going to put everything to the test. We’re headed into something extremely difficult and dangerous, and I don’t know where this is going to end or how.”