Gaza City: Israeli troops rounded up dozens of ministers and lawmakers from the Palestinians' ruling Hamas party on Thursday, while pressing a military campaign in Gaza meant to win the release of an Israeli soldier held by Hamas gunmen.
Israeli warplanes also buzzed the summer home of Syria's president, Bashar Assad, who harbors the hard-line Hamas leaders Israel blames for masterminding the kidnapping.
Adding to the tension, the body of a kidnapped 18-year-old Jewish settler who was shot in the head was found in the West Bank, Israeli security officials said.
Palestinian militants said they executed Eliahu Asheri, whose body was found buried near the West Bank city of Ramallah.
The soldier's capture on Sunday by Hamas' military wing and two affiliated groups, and Israel's subsequent military incursion into Gaza threatened to bring the two sides to the brink of all-out war.
Hamas, which took over the Palestinian Authority after winning parliamentary elections in January, has resisted international pressure to renounce violence and recognize Israel.
An Israeli military official said a total of 64 Hamas officials were arrested in the early morning roundup. Of those, Palestinian officials said seven are ministers in Hamas' 23-member Cabinet and 20 others are lawmakers in the 72-seat parliament.
Palestinian parliament speaker Abdel Aziz Duaik and Religious Affairs Minister Nayef Rajoub, brother of former West Bank strongman Jibril Rajoub of the rival Fatah party, were among those rounded up.
There were conflicting reports about whether Deputy Prime Minister Nasser Shaer, who has called for the release of Israeli Cpl. Gilad Shalit, was arrested.
Officials will be questioned and eventually indicted, the Israeli army and government officials said.
Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said the ministers and lawmakers were not taken as bargaining chips for Shalit's release, but because Israel holds Hamas responsible for attacks against it.
''The arrests of these Hamas officials is part of a campaign against a terrorist organization that has escalated its war of terror against Israeli civilians,'' Regev said.
Israel has said it would not negotiate Shalit's release with the militants and has rejected demands to free Palestinian prisoners in exchange for information about the captured soldier.
Palestinians were outraged by the arrests.
''We have no government we have nothing. They have all been taken,'' said Saeb Erekat, an ally of the moderate Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas.
''This is absolutely unacceptable and we demand their release immediately.''
Although the Israeli action was touched off by the soldier's capture, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's government has also been alarm by a surge in the firing of homemade rockets on Israeli communities bordering Gaza.
A militant offshoot of Abbas' Fatah party said it had fired a homemade rocket with a chemical warhead at the southern Israeli town of Sderot late Wednesday, the first such claim.
The Israeli military said it did not detect a rocket fired then, and there was no way to verify the claim.
Israeli warplanes, tanks and thousands of troops began moving into Gaza overnight Tuesday.
They knocked out Gaza's only power station, made main roads impassable and took over Gaza's long-closed airport.
Aircraft bombed empty Hamas training camps, witnesses said, and flew low over the coastal strip in an apparent attempt to intimidate.
Air strikes against the training camps continued on Thursday, with two strikes against camps in southern Gaza used by Hamas and the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, a Fatah offshoot.
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