Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Thursday he was "very distressed" about a pre-dawn Israeli artillery attack that killed 18 civilians, mostly women and children, in the Gaza village of Beit Hanoun Wednesday.

The New York Times reports that Mr. Olmert said the shells were "aimed at an orange grove used by rocket squads in northern Gaza to attack Israel."

"This particular case ... was a mistake. It was not a planned attack" [Olmert] said. "It was a technical failure of the Israeli artillery. I checked it, and I verified it."

He added, however, that Israel will continue its military operations in Gaza as long as Palestinian rocket attacks persist. He said Israel will do everything it can to avoid similar mistakes, but warned that further tragedies are possible.

Haaretz reports that Olmert also called for an immediate meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to discuss the situation, and was prepared to offer the Mr. Abbas "a lot."

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As Palestinian mourners buried the victims Thursday, the head of the military wing of Hamas said the truce that his organization had declared with Israel 18 months ago is over. The Guardian reports that Khaled Meshaal, who lives in exile in Damascus, promised retaliation for the deaths, which were almost all from one extended family, the Athamnas.

"Our condemnation will not be in words but in deeds," Mr. Meshaal said. "All Palestinian groups are urged to activate resistance."

Deutsche Presse-Agentur reports that the Hamas military wing also called for strikes on American targets in the Middle East, saying that the US provides "political and logistical cover" for the Israeli government and is partially responsible for what happened in Beit Hanoun.

The Associated Press also said Abbas has resumed discussions with Mr. Mashaal, their first conversation in months, Palestinian officials said, in a sign that the two sides are close to forming a joint government after months of negotiations. Abbas called Mashaal at the urging of advisers who realized that progress could not be made without dealing with the Hamas leader, officials said.

In an analysis of the situation for Haaretz, correspondents Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff write that the shelling of Beit Hanoun is the "Palestinian Kfar Kana." Kfar Kana is the Lebanese village near a United Nation's post where 100 civilians were killed by Israeli shelling in 1996. Mr. Harel and Mr. Issacharoff called Abbas politically courageous for condemning the shelling, but then immediately imploring "Palestinian organizations to refrain from irresponsible reaction, such as rocket fire or suicide bombings" as they would damage Palestinian interests. The problem for Israel, however, is that it is Meshaal, not Abbas, is "calling the shots."

Unlike Abbas, Meshal delivered the goods to his public: He promised revenge. "We won't make do with denunciations," he rebuked Abbas. "We'll answer the deaths with "deeds, not words."

Meshal knows that resuming the suicide bombings will exact a painful political price. Hamas' entire leadership would become a target for Israeli assassinations, and the Hamas government will cease to function. But at this stage, it is more important for Hamas' leadership to respond to the voices from the street than to preserve the already faltering government.

The authors of the piece also point out that during the recent war against Hizbullah in Lebanon, Israeli artillery avoided shelling within a one-kilometer "safety range" around civilian homes. In Gaza however, the safety range is only 200 or 300 meters, which makes it much easier to mistakenly hit civilian targets.

The BBC reports that the attack generated worldwide condemnation. Many foreign governments and aid agencies, including the Red Cross and UNICEF, called the shelling of the civilian homes a "profoundly shocking event," and that it was "hard to see what this action was meant to achieve and how it can be justified." Even within Israel, the human rights group B'Tselem said that the Israeli Defense Force's explanation of the incident as a "regrettable" accident was "disingenuous lip service."

Some of the strongest words of condemnation came from John Dugard, the UN special rapporteur on human rights and a longtime critic of Israel's policies in the occupied territories.

"This brutal collective punishment of a people, not a government, has passed largely unnoticed by the international community. The Quartet ... has done little to halt Israel's attacks.

"Worse still, the [UN] Security Council has failed to adopt any resolution on the subject or attempt to restore peace to the region. The time has come for urgent action on the part of the Security Council."

In an analysis in YNetNews, some Israeli politicians and media experts believe that after an incident like Beit Hanoun, Israel needs to create a public relations response to deal with the damage "inflicted on Israel's image in what is slowly becoming the most important theater of operations – the media arena."

According to [Dr. Ra'anan Gissin, former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's media adviser], Israel must deal with the Palestinians on two fronts: "The ground one and the virtual front, the media front."

"We have to understand that we have no choice but to win on all the fronts," says Gissin, "because if we don't win our range of our freedom to act will narrow. We must prepare for the media war as we prepare for the ground one � and that includes an operational doctrine, collecting intelligence and the appropriate preparations."

Meanwhile in the same article, Zvi Mazel, Israel's former ambassador to Egypt and Sweden, says that Israel must not apologize for actions like the one in Beit Hanoun, because doing so weakens Israel's position.

"The world must be told in the clearest manner that the responsibility lies solely with the terror organizations, which bring it on themselves. Foreign Minister Livni should have convened the foreign press by that afternoon and explained to the journalists that terror groups operate from within the civilian population with the intent to draw the IDF there." ...

"The world must understand that the lives of Israeli citizens have become hell – they can't work, they can't live, not to mention the economic damage. If Livni and her friends were saying that, then our situation would be completely different."

Writing in the Guardian, Jameela al-Shanti, a Hamas member of the Palestinian legislature from Beit Hamoun, writes of how women in the Gaza Strip have increasingly taken the lead in confronting Israeli troops, and the international community as well.

But as though this occupation and collective punishment were not enough, we Palestinians find ourselves the targets of a systematic siege imposed by the so-called free world. We are being starved and suffocated as a punishment for daring to exercise our democratic right to choose who rules and represents us. Nothing undermines the west's claims to defend freedom and democracy more than what is happening in Palestine. ...

Why should we Palestinians have to accept the theft of our land, the ethnic cleansing of our people, incarcerated in forsaken refugee camps, and the denial of our most basic human rights, without protesting and resisting?

Not all Palestinians believe that Israel is solely responsible for the Beit Hamoun deaths. The Boston Globe reports that Zakaria al-Kafarna, whose sister lost a 10-year-old son in the shelling, partially blamed the militants for firing rockets from nearby the houses. Anyone can come to the area and fire a rocket, he said. "What about us? We are sleeping."

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Feedback appreciated. E-mail Tom Regan.