By DPA
Gaza City : Israel Monday threatened to assassinate top Hamas political leaders, including Khaled Mashal, as it pressed on with air strikes in Gaza in response to a week of intense rocket fire from the Gaza Strip at its southern territory.
The five killed in the attacks Monday included four Islamic Jihad militants who died when their car was hit by a missile fired from a helicopter as it travelled in the northern Gaza Strip in the early afternoon.
An Israeli military spokeswoman said the targets were in charge of the production of al-Quds rockets used against Israel.
A Gaza City brick factory that Israel said was used to manufacture Hamas-made Qassam rockets and two Islamic Jihad metal workshops were also among the targets hit. One civilian was killed in the attack.
Earlier, an Israeli air strike late Sunday near the house of a senior Hamas lawmaker Khalil al-Haiya killed seven members of his extended family. The legislator himself was lightly injured.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's cabinet late Sunday authorized targeted killings of Hamas and Islamic Jihad military commanders. Both radical Islamic groups have taken responsibility for most of the over 150 Gaza-made Qassam and al-Quds rockets launched at Israel during the past week.
The cabinet did not authorise the Israel Air Force to strike at Hamas' political leaders, but a leading Israeli cabinet minister warned that at least one top Hamas leader in exile, Khaled Mashaal, was on Israel's hit list.
"I am convinced that they (Israel) will part from him at the earliest opportunity, even though the complexity, the sensitivity and the fact that he isn't here on the other side of the (West Bank security) fence obviously makes things a lot more difficult," said Internal Security Minister Avi Dichter.
"Khaled Mashaal is certainly not immune, not in Damascus and not in any other place," Dichter, a member of Olmert's Kadima party and of the premier's 12-man security cabinet, told Israel Army Radio.
As the head of Hamas' Syrian-based political bureau, Mashaal is the ruling Palestinian movement's most senior leader abroad.
Mashaal's deputy in Damascus, Moussa Abu Marzouk, dubbed the announcement "cowardly". "This Israeli policy is cowardly and the entire world should stand against it," he said.
Mashaal survived an Israeli assassination attempt a decade ago, when two Israeli Mossad agents injected him with poison in the streets of Amman. The two agents were caught in a subsequent chase, sparking an embarrassing scandal which forced then premier Benjamin Netanyahu to hand over an antidote to the Jordanian authorities.
According to Dichter, Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniya would also be a target if Israel had evidence that he was involved in ordering the rocket attacks against it.
Political observers in Gaza believe Hamas escalated its rocket fire against Israel to restore unity in Palestine and end a deadly wave of internal clashes with the rival Fatah party of President Mahmoud Abbas.
The strategy seems to have worked, the observers said. A tense internal ceasefire that took effect Saturday at 3 pm (1200 GMT) was still holding by late Monday afternoon.
Over 50 Palestinians had been killed in a week of fighting that bordered on civil war and threatened the two-month-old Hamas-Fatah unity government.
Haniya called on the parties to abide by the internal truce. "I call on Hamas and Fatah to abstain from the sideline battles, to reinforce the (truce) deals and to stand united before the Israeli aggressions," the premier said in a televised address.