Free Syrian Army fighters look through a window overlooking al-Tarraf checkpoint after seizing it from forces of Syria's President Bashar al-Assad in the southern Idlib countryside July 7, 2014. REUTERS/Khalil Ashawi

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Only four percent of Syrians believe Islamic State insurgents, who have captured large swathes of Syria and Iraq, represent their interests, according to research conducted by a British polling group published on Wednesday.

The survey, conducted by Opinion Research Business (ORB) with 1,014 adults in face-to-face interviews, found that about one in three Syrians believe President Bashar al-Assad and his government best represent Syrians' interests.

"This (research) is a unique insight into public opinion in Syria ... They don't believe the extremist groups best represent their views," said ORB Managing Director Johnny Heald.

Syria's three-year-old civil war began with pro-democracy protests but the Assad government cracked down hard on them, leading his opponents to take up arms and to become increasingly radicalised.

This year the rebel groups have been sidelined by fighters of the Islamic State, an al Qaeda offshoot, who execute Shi'ite Muslims and have enforced a strict interpretation of Islam in areas they control that has angered and horrified many civilians.

The Islamic State, previously known as Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), also wants to erase national boundaries from the Mediterranean to the Gulf and return the region to a mediaeval-style caliphate.

Assad's forces have managed to hold on to the capital Damascus and strategic areas along the coast.

The ORB research covered 12 of Syria's 14 provinces, in areas controlled by both the government and various opposition groups, including in Raqqa, Islamic State's stronghold.

Deir al-Zor, where Islamic State fighters have taken ground, was not covered. Quneitra, which is split between Assad's forces and rebels, was also left out of the survey.

ORB's Heald said the survey was carried out by local Syrian interviewing teams during May. He said the poll was not privately commissioned but an internal initiative because "very little research is done on public opinion in Syria".

Founded in 1994, ORB specialises in polling in conflict zones and has worked in the past with the British and U.S. governments and with the United Nations.

(Reporting by Oliver Holmes; Editing by Gareth Jones)

By Nidal al-Mughrabi and Ori Lewis

GAZA/JERUSALEM (Reuters) - At least 23 people were killed across Gaza, Palestinian officials said on Wednesday, by a bombardment Israel said may be just the start of a lengthy offensive against Islamist militants whose rockets struck deeper than ever before into Israel.

Israelis ran for cover late on Tuesday as air-raid sirens sounded in the business capital Tel Aviv and the holy city of Jerusalem, both of which were hit in the Gaza war of November 2012.

Hamas said it also fired a rocket at the major northern city of Haifa, 140 km (88 miles) away, and though this was not confirmed, Israel said a rocket had landed in Hadera, 100 km (60 miles) from Gaza, further than had previously been reached.

While the Israelis reported no casualties, the long-range salvo was celebrated by the outgunned Palestinians as proof of their resolve in hostilities that flared three weeks ago after the abduction and murder of three Jewish seminary students.

The rocket strikes could lead to an Israeli ground invasion, something officials have said is a possible option.

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Israeli soldiers ride atop a tank outside the southern Gaza Strip July 7, 2014. REUTERS/Baz Ratner

In the densely populated Gaza Strip, explosions echoed day and night, shaking buildings and sending up plumes of smoke. At least 17 civilians, including five children, were among the 23 dead, Palestinian officials said. On the Israeli side, at least two people were wounded, medics said.

Israel assassinated a senior local leader of the Islamic Jihad militant group in the northern Gaza Strip early on Wednesday, neighbours and hospital officials said, and five others including family members were killed.

An Israeli military spokeswoman said she had no initial details on the strike.

The militant, Hafez Hamad, two brothers and his parents were killed when his house was bombed in an air strike in the town of Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip, Hamas media and Gaza interior ministry said. An unidentified woman in the house was also killed.

Another Hamas militant was targeted in another air strike in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, Hamas officials said.

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Smoke and flames are seen following what witnesses said were Israeli air strikes in Rafah in the sou …

Since Israel launched its offensive on Tuesday, five Hamas gunmen, an Islamic Jihad leader and 17 civilians, including seven children, have been killed.

On Tuesday afternoon, Israel's Iron Dome interceptor shot down a rocket fired at Tel Aviv by Gaza faction Islamic Jihad.

"We will not tolerate rocket fire against our cities and townships, and therefore I ordered a significant broadening of IDF (Israel Defence Force) operations against the terrorists of Hamas and other terror groups in the Gaza Strip," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement.

He called on Israelis to rally together and "show resilience because this operation could take time".

Israel has threatened to invade Gaza if the rockets persist.

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Palestinian boys look at a crater which police said was caused by an Israeli air strike in the centr …

In a bold infiltration, gunmen from Hamas landed on the shore near Zikim adjacent to the Gaza border, where a kibbutz and a military base are located. Four gunmen were killed.

ABBAS TALKS TO EGYPT

Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who is based in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and entered a power-share with Hamas in April after years of feuding, said he had spoken to regional power broker Egypt about the Gaza crisis.

Under President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Cairo has secured closures on the Egyptian-Gaza border, increasing economic pressure on Hamas from a long-running Israeli blockade.

"Sisi stressed Egypt was interested in the safety of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip and sparing this grave assault," a statement from Abbas's office said, adding that Cairo would "exert efforts to reach an immediate ceasefire".

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Israeli soldiers gather at a military staging area outside the southern Gaza Strip July 7, 2014. REU …

In a televised speech later, Abbas said he had been in touch with the various Palestinian factions and leaders of Hamas whom, he said, did not want an escalation.

Washington backed Israel's actions in Gaza while the European Union and United Nations urged restraint on both sides.

"We strongly condemn the continuing rocket fire inside of Israel and the deliberate targeting of civilians by terrorist organisations in Gaza," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said.

"No country can accept rocket fire aimed at civilians and we support Israel's right to defend itself against these vicious attacks."

The surge in violence along the Gaza border, which is the worst since an eight-day war in 2012 when Tel Aviv was also targeted, followed a chain of events that began with the abduction of three Jewish seminary students in the occupied West Bank on June 12.

Blaming Hamas, which neither confirmed nor denied a role, the Israelis arrested hundreds of its activists in their search for the teenagers who were eventually found dead, as was a Palestinian youth abducted in Jerusalem last Wednesday in a suspected revenge murder.

Palestinians have since launched more than 200 rockets from Gaza, Israel has said.

While threatening an "earthquake" of escalation against Israel, Hamas said it could restore calm if Israel halted the Gaza offensive, once again committed to a 2012 Egyptian-brokered truce and freed prisoners it detained in the West Bank last month.

The Israeli military said on Tuesday that, to support regular forces, it had called up 1,000 reserve troops out of a pool of 40,000 approved on Tuesday by the security cabinet. Some 1,500 other reservists have already been mobilised.

(Additional reporting by Dan Williams, Jeffrey Heller and Maayan Lubell in Jerusalem, Noah Browning and Ali Sawafta in Ramallah and Mark Felsenthal in Washington; Writing by Ori Lewis; Editing by Toni Reinhold)

Iraq: 'Terrorists' seize ex-chemical weapons site

The Islamic State extremist group has taken control of a vast former chemical weapons facility northwest of Baghdad, where remnants of 2,500 degraded chemical rockets filled decades ago with the deadly nerve agent sarin are stored along with other chemical warfare agents, Iraq said in a letter circulated Tuesday at the United Nations.

The U.S. government played down the threat from the takeover, saying there are no intact chemical weapons and it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to use the material for military purposes.

Iraq's U.N. Ambassador Mohamed Ali Alhakim told U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in a letter that "armed terrorist groups" entered the Muthanna site on June 11, detained officers and soldiers from the protection force guarding the facilities and seized their weapons. The following morning, the project manager spotted the looting of some equipment via the camera surveillance system before the "terrorists" disabled it, he said.

The Islamic State group, which controls parts of Syria, sent its fighters into neighboring Iraq last month and quickly captured a vast stretch of territory straddling the border between the two countries. Last week, its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, declared the establishment of an Islamic state, or caliphate, in the land the extremists control.

Alhakim said as a result of the takeover of Muthanna, Iraq is unable "to fulfil its obligations to destroy chemical weapons" because of the deteriorating security situation. He said it would resume its obligations "as soon as the security situation has improved and control of the facility has been regained."

Alhakim singled out the capture of bunkers 13 and 41 in the sprawling complex 35 miles (56 kilometers) northwest of Baghdad in the notorious "Sunni Triangle."

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Tehran, Iran - 1987: A Kurd woman, victim of a mustard gas attack by Saddam Hussein on frontier of I …

The last major report by U.N. inspectors on the status of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program was released about a year after the experts left in March 2003. It states that Bunker 13 contained 2,500 sarin-filled 122-mm chemical rockets produced and filled before 1991, and about 180 tons of sodium cyanide, "a very toxic chemical and a precursor for the warfare agent tabun."

The U.N. said the bunker was bombed during the first Gulf War in February 1991, which routed Iraq from Kuwait, and the rockets were "partially destroyed or damaged."

It said the sarin munitions were "of poor quality" and "would largely be degraded after years of storage under the conditions existing there." It said the tabun-filled containers were all treated with decontamination solution and likely no longer contain any agent, but "the residue of this decontamination would contain cyanides, which would still be a hazard."

According to the report, Bunker 41 contained 2,000 empty 155-mm artillery shells contaminated with the chemical warfare agent mustard, 605 one-ton mustard containers with residues, and heavily contaminated construction material. It said the shells could contain mustard residues which can't be used for chemical warfare but "remain highly toxic."

U.S. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki expressed concern on June 20 about the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant seizing the complex, but played down the importance of the two bunkers with "degraded chemical remnants," saying the material dates back to the 1980s and was stored after being dismantled by U.N. inspectors in the 1990s.

She said the remnants "don't include intact chemical weapons ... and would be very difficult, if not impossible, to safely use this for military purposes or, frankly, to move it."

The Muthanna facility, south of the city of Samarra, was Iraq's primary site for the production of chemical weapons agents. After the end of the first Gulf War, U.N. weapons inspectors worked there to get rid of chemicals that could be used in weapons, destroy production plants and equipment, and eliminate chemical warfare agents. The U.N. inspectors left just before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and never returned. The U.S.-led Iraq Survey Group then took over the search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and found none.

News of the facility's takeover came amid continued political uncertainty in Iraq as leaders must agree on a new government that can confront the militant offensive that has plunged the country into its worst crisis since the last U.S. troops left in 2011.

Iraq's parliament on Tuesday officially rescheduled its next session for Sunday after it was criticized for earlier plans to take a five-week break.

JERUSALEM (AP) — The Israeli army on Wednesday intensified its offensive on the Hamas-run Gaza Strip, striking Hamas sites and killing at least 8 people on the second day of a military operation it says is aimed at quenching rocket fire against Israel.

The offensive has set off the heaviest fighting between Israel and the Islamic militant group Hamas since an eight-day battle in November 2012. Militants unleashed rocket salvos deep into Israeli territory, and Israel mobilized thousands of forces along the Gaza border for a possible ground invasion into the Palestinian territory.

Since the offensive began Tuesday, Israel has attacked more than 400 sites in Gaza, killing at least 32 people. The strikes from air and sea came after militants fired more than 160 rockets at Israel, including one that reached the northern Israeli city of Hadera for the first time. The city is about 100 kilometers (60 miles) from Gaza.

The army said it attacked more than 160 sites in Gaza early Wednesday, including 118 concealed rockets launching sites, six Hamas compounds — including naval police and national security compounds — 10 militant command centers, weapons storage facilities and 10 tunnels used for militant activity and to ferry supplies in from Egypt. The border between Gaza and Egypt has effectively been closed for months.

Gaza health official Ashraf Al-Kedra said Wednesday's airstrikes killed one militant in south Gaza, as well as an Islamic Jihad operative, his mother, and four siblings in northern Gaza. Another man was killed on a motorcycle, but his identity was not immediately known.

Only four rockets were fired from Gaza toward Israel overnight, the army said, a significant decline from the large number that hit Israeli cities the night before, setting off air raid sirens in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and other areas of the country.

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By early Wednesday, air raid sirens sounded in Tel Aviv and Israel's south early Wednesday, and the army said two rockets were apparently intercepted above the central Israeli city by an anti-missile battery.

Lerner, the army spokesman, told reporters that the military's aim was to take a "substantial toll" on Hamas and to deplete its rocket capabilities. He said the army would gradually ramp up its strikes on Gaza.

"The organization is going to pay for its aggression. It is literally holding us hostage with its rockets," Lerner said. "The country is not willing for this situation to continue."

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called from the West Bank on the international community and the United Nations to "provide international protection for our people." He said in a televised statement late Tuesday that Hamas leaders in Gaza want to restore calm.

"I have been in contact with the regional and international parties in the last few days, particularly Hamas leaders in Gaza, and everyone I've talked to expressed his willingness to restore the truce and stop the escalation," Abbas said. He called the Israeli offensive on Gaza an "orchestrated and brutal aggression."

Israel intensifies offensive on Gaza militants

More than 200 Hamas sites are struck on the second day of the Israeli army assault.
At least 22 people killed