Hamas fires rockets at Israel, ending truce

By Nidal al-Mughrabi

GAZA (Reuters) – Hamas fired rockets at Israel on Saturday,
formally ending a 16-month-old truce, after seven Palestinians
on a Gaza beach were killed by Israeli shelling.

Thousands of Palestinian mourners wept with 7-year-old Huda
Ghalya as she kneeled to kiss her dead father before he, her
mother and three siblings were buried in northern Gaza.

The five, including a 4-month-old, a 3-year-old and a
10-year-old, were among the seven killed during a seaside
outing on Friday after Israeli gunboats shelled the area to
curb cross-border rocket fire. Twenty people were wounded.

“Please do not leave me alone,” said Huda, who had been
swimming in the Mediterranean when the blast tore up the beach.

A spokesman for Hamas’s Izz el-Deen al-Qassam brigades said
they had resumed attacks against Israel in response to the
shelling, firing 11 rockets and 12 mortar bombs from Gaza.

The army said it identified four impacts inside Israel,
which caused no casualties or damage.

With peacemaking now an even more remote prospect, a senior
official said President Mahmoud Abbas would announce at 1300
GMT he was ordering a referendum on a proposal for Palestinian
statehood, opposed by Hamas, that implicitly recognizes 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.

“DEEP REGRET”

Israel Radio said Defense Minister Amir Peretz had sent a
message to Abbas voicing “deep regret at the deaths of innocent
people.”

Israel’s army said one of its shells may have hit the beach
by accident, but it was still investigating. The radio reported
Peretz would receive the results of the probe later in the day.

“One possibility is that it is one of our shells. We can
say for certain that five out of six of the shells we fired in
the area fell where we wanted them to,” Brigadier-General Yair
Kochavi told Israeli Army Radio.

“The other possibility … is that we’re talking about an
unexploded shell in place for weeks or months and they played
with it,” said Kochavi, the army’s commander for the region.

The Izz el-Deen al-Qassam spokesman said Saturday’s rocket
attacks were in response to “Zionist crimes and the killings of
civilians in Gaza.”

Washington said Israeli artillery fire was responsible for
the bloodshed on the beach, but also called on the Palestinian
Authority “to prevent all acts of terrorism, including the
firing of missiles and rockets from Gaza.”

Hamas has abstained from striking in Israel since a truce
was announced in early 2005. Israeli officials said the group
has been helping other militant factions to carry out daily
rocket launchings from Gaza, territory Israel quit last year.

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 manifesto calls for a Palestinian state on all of the
Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank. Opinion polls show most
Palestinians back the proposal. Israel calls it a non-starter.

(Additional reporting by Wafa Amr in Ramallah)