Hamas fires rockets at Israel, ending truce
GAZA, June 10 (Reuters) Hamas launched rockets at Israel on Saturday,
formally ending a 16-month-old truce, after blaming Israeli artillery
fire for the killing of seven Palestinians relaxing on a Gaza beach.
Amid the bloodshed, officials said President Mahmoud Abbas was
weighing whether to go ahead with a planned announcement later in the
day to order a referendum on a statehood proposal, opposed by Hamas,
that implicitly recognises Israel.
The manifesto penned by Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails is at
the heart of Abbas's power struggle with Hamas, an Islamic militant
group dedicated to Israel's destruction that came to power after a
January election.
An Israeli army spokesman said six rockets were fired from Gaza
overnight but it was still unclear whether any had landed inside Israeli
territory.
"This is only the start and rocket firings will continue," said a
spokesman for Hamas's Izz el-Deen al-Qassam Brigades, a group that
carried out nearly 60 suicide bombings in Israel since the start of a
Palestinian uprising in 2000.
"Next time, the rockets will be longer in range and they will hit
places deeper inside the Zionist entity. The attacks come in response to
the Zionist crimes and the killings of civilians in Gaza," he said.
Hamas has largely abided by a truce announced in early 2005.
Israeli officials, however, said the group has been helping other
militant factions to carry out daily cross-border rocket attacks from
Gaza, territory Israel quit last year.
Investigation
Israel said it was investigating whether its forces were responsible
for killing the seven Palestinians on the beach in the northern Gaza
Strip on Friday. It had been shelling the area to stop militants firing
rockets over the frontier. Among the dead were three children aged 1, 3
and 10.
The Palestinian Authority declared three days of mourning. "This may
have been an accident which caused an artillery shell to fall off
course, or an older unexploded shell which went off, or perhaps an
explosive device which was tinkered with," said Israeli Major-General
Yoav Galant.
He said he was sorry for the loss of civilian life.
Washington said Israeli artillery fire was responsible for the
deaths.
"The United States expresses its regret for the killing and wounding
of innocent Palestinians in Gaza ... as a result of artillery fire by
the Israeli Defense Forces," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack
said in a statement.
In a telephone conversation early on Saturday, Abbas asked U.S.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for immediate U.S. intervention to
stop violence from escalating, a Palestinian official said. Before the
explosion on the Gaza beach, Israel killed three men in an airstrike on
what the army said was a rocket crew.
Palestinians said they were civilians. Rocket fire had intensified on
Friday following Israel's killing of a senior militant the day before.
Fears of increased Israeli-Palestinian violence, as well as internal
Palestinian clashes, have grown as the struggle for power has
intensified between Abbas and Hamas.
Hamas officials accuse Abbas of using the referendum to try to
engineer the downfall of their government, which has struggled with a
Western aid embargo and growing disorder.
The proposed manifesto implicitly recognises Israel by calling for a
Palestinian state on all of the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank,
which Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war. Israel withdrew from
the Gaza Strip last year. |