Hamas calls off truce with Israel after ten die

By Nidal al-Mughrabi

GAZA (Reuters) – Islamic militant group Hamas called off a
16-month-old truce with Israel on Friday after attacks blamed
on Israeli forces killed 10 Palestinians, including three
children playing on a beach.

Israel’s army, which had been shelling northern Gaza to
curb rocket fire by militants, said it was investigating the
deaths.

Hamas, sworn to destroying the Jewish state, vowed to
revive a campaign marked by suicide bombings that it put on
hold well before winning elections that gave it control of the
Palestinian government in March.

Renewed violence could bury Western hopes of pressuring
Hamas to soften its stand and raise questions over a referendum
that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas planned on a statehood
proposal implicitly recognizing Israel.

“The Israeli massacres represent a direct opening battle,”
Hamas’s armed wing said in a statement echoed by its political
leaders.

“The earthquake in the Zionist cities will resume and the
herds of occupiers have no choice but to prepare the coffins or
the departing luggage.”

There was no immediate comment on Hamas’s announcement from
Israel or from Abbas, locked in a power struggle with the
Islamists.

Palestinian officials said Israeli air strikes and
artillery fire killed 10 Palestinians in Gaza, the highest
Palestinian toll in a single day since 2004. Seven people,
including five from the same family, were killed in what
Palestinian officials said was Israeli shellfire from boats on
to a crowded beach.

Among the dead were three children, aged 1, 3 and 10. Their
sister, who had been swimming, survived. Twenty people were
wounded. Covered in blood, children screamed as adults carried
the wounded and dead from the sand.

Israel regularly shells parts of the northern Gaza Strip
used by militants to fire rockets over the border. The army
said it had suspended all shelling and begun an investigation.
A commander said he regretted any civilian deaths.

ARMY INVESTIGATING

“We did not fire into a place where there were innocents,”
Major-General Yoav Galant told reporters. “We are exploring two
possibilities, a wrongly aimed artillery shell or an
independent incident we were not involved in.”

He did not say who else might have been behind the deaths.

In a separate incident, an Israeli airstrike killed three
men that the army said it believed had just fired rockets into
Israel. Palestinians said the men were civilians.

Militants had stepped up rocket fire from Gaza on Friday
following Israel’s killing on Thursday of senior militant Abu
Samhadana, who had also been appointed by Hamas as a top
security commander.

Abbas called the deaths on the beach “a bloody massacre”
and declared three days of mourning.

Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, also a Hamas leader and a
political opponent of Abbas, called the deaths a “war crime”
and urged Jordan and Egypt, both mediators in past
Israeli-Palestinian talks, to intervene.

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri confirmed the militant group
would renew its attacks.

“I believe that amid the continued bloodshed of our people
and the horrific images of massacres, there is no place for
silence,” Abu Zuhri said.

The bloodshed on Friday added to tensions after Haniyeh
made a last-minute appeal to Abbas to abandon a referendum on a
statehood proposal that has been rejected by the Islamist
group.

Abbas was expected to issue a decree on Saturday that would
allow a referendum by July 31, setting a date for a showdown
with Hamas.

Haniyeh said it had “no legal and constitutional basis.”

The proposed manifesto implicitly recognizes 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.

(Additional reporting by Jerusalem and Ramallah bureaus)