McCain visits Israel; remarks draw more fire

SDEROT, Israel — Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., stood in the shattered kitchen of Aliza and Pinhas Amar's house here Wednesday and looked up at what should have been the ceiling. Instead, sunlight streamed through a gaping hole caused by a Qassam rocket fired from nearby Gaza that tore off part of the orange-tiled roof in December.

"I'm sorry this happened to you," said McCain, who came to see what life under the threat of rocket fire was like as part of his weeklong trip to the Middle East and Europe. "We'll try to see that it doesn't happen again."

McCain's visit to Sderot — a town near Gaza that has been hit by more than 2,000 rockets in the past four years and where siren warnings are common and concrete rocket shelters are proliferating — came in the middle of what was officially a Senate fact-finding trip.

The trip also offered McCain, the presumptive Republican Party nominee for president, an opportunity to signal his support of Israel to Jewish and evangelical Christian voters back home.

His foreign trip was having reverberations back in the United States, where Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., seized on misstatements McCain made Tuesday in Amman, Jordan, when he said several times that Iran was training terrorists for al-Qaida in Iraq. (McCain then corrected himself to say that Iran was training extremists, not al-Qaida members.)

Obama said: "We heard Sen. McCain confuse Sunni and Shiite, Iran and al-Qaida. Maybe that is why he voted to go to war with a country that had no al-Qaida ties."

That led Mark Salter, a senior McCain adviser, to counter that Obama's proposal to end the war would lead to more violence there. "To say that invading Iraq was used as a recruiting tool for al-Qaida is one thing," Salter said. "To pretend that our defeat there won't provide an even bigger one is foolish supposition."

Here in Israel, though, McCain spent the day dwelling on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The visit to Sderot provided him with an opportunity to express again his support for Israel and to condemn Hamas, which governs Gaza.

"It's very difficult to negotiate with an organization that is dedicated to your extinction," he said.

Palestinian militants in Gaza say they launch rockets in response to Israeli military aggression.