JERUSALEM: Hamas rockets fired from the Gaza Strip can reach Tel Aviv and the Islamist group has replenished and improved its arsenal since a war with Israel nearly a year ago, Israeli officials said yesterday.

Two senior Israeli officials said Hamas, in charge of the coastal Gaza Strip, had successfully tested rockets that flew 60km into the Mediterranean, putting Tel Aviv, Israel’s capital, into their range.

Hamas’s military arm declined to comment. Fawzi Barhoum, spokesman for its political wing, said in response to the Israeli comments: “The enemy’s talk about Hamas possessing weapons is a fabrication and a pretext to incite against it.”

Israel launched a 22-day offensive in the Gaza Strip last December with the declared aim of ending rocket fire that fell almost daily on southern Israeli towns. During the fighting, which ended on January 18 with both sides declaring unilateral ceasefires, Palestinian rockets reached distances of about 40km.

Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon told reporters Hamas had replenished all its equipment losses since the war ended and had upgraded and increased the range of its rockets. Israel maintains a blockade of the Gaza Strip but Hamas runs a network of smuggling tunnels under the border with Egypt.

Ayalon said the group had obtained missiles with a 60-km range, similar to those fired into northern Israel by the Lebanese Hezbollah group during a 2006 war. Israel’s military intelligence chief, Amos Yadlin, told a parliamentary committee the 60-km-range rockets had been test-fired by Hamas into the sea.

“Hamas has entered the family of enemies that has a rocket arsenal that can reach the centre of the country along with Iran, Syria and Hezbollah,” a parliament spokesman quoted Yadlin as saying.

Any rocket attacks in close vicinity to Tel Aviv would likely prompt a heavy Israeli response. Such strikes could also have an impact on international air travel to Israel’s main international airport, Ben-Gurion, near Tel Aviv.

Since the Gaza ceasefire, militants in the territory have occasionally fired short-range rockets into Israel and Israeli jets have bombed smuggling tunnels along the Gaza-Egypt frontier.

Meanwhile, Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said yesterday that Cairo wants assurances that any Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations would ensure a Palestinian state and not be used to “waste time”. His remarks came ahead of a visit to Egypt by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who on Saturday endorsed Israel’s view that settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank should not be a bar to resuming talks - contradicting the Palestinian stance.

Clinton, facing Arab accusations that she had been too soft on Israel, later said in Morocco that Israel’s offer to show restraint on settlements fell short of US expectations. “We want to have guarantees for the Palestinians ... that ensure them that these negotiations will not be used to waste time or to accomplish Israeli objectives against them,” Aboul Gheit said.