No rocket fire before pullout – Islamic Jihad

By Nidal al-Mughrabi

GAZA (Reuters) – Islamic Jihad announced on Wednesday it
was halting its rocket attacks against Israel, after a rocket
fired toward an Israeli town fell short and killed a 6-year-old
Palestinian boy in the northern Gaza Strip.

The Palestinian militant group denied it was one of its
rockets that killed Yasser al-Ashqar. It said it took the
decision to suspend the attacks several days ago in order to
ensure Israel’s planned pullout from the occupied territory
proceeds without disruption.

“The Jerusalem Brigades leadership had given orders to all
its groups to stop firing rockets to preserve the Palestinian
national project at this delicate and decisive stage of
history, and to give a chance for a Zionist departure from our
dear Gaza Strip in (conditions of) calm,” Islamic Jihad said.

It issued the statement amid calls from Palestinian leaders
and the boy’s family for all factions to cease launching
rockets at Israel. The makeshift weapons have killed two
Palestinian youngsters and wounded some 30 people in Gaza in
the past month.

There was no claim of responsibility for Wednesday’s
attack, two weeks before Israel was due to begin evacuating all
21 Gaza settlements and four of 120 in the West Bank.

A February ceasefire deal faltered badly last month with a
resurgence of rocket and mortar attacks by militant groups, and
a suicide bombing by Islamic Jihad, as well as fresh air
strikes by Israel. But general calm has prevailed for the past
10 days.

“Rockets have become more harmful than useful,” Zaki
al-Ashqar, a relative of the dead boy, said in a traditional
mourning tent in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun.

“We cannot compare what rockets have achieved in hurting
the enemy to the human and financial losses it has caused the
Palestinians,” he said, pointing to large tracts of
agricultural land razed by Israeli forces following
cross-border attacks.

Israel says the bulldozing of olive and citrus groves is
aimed at denying cover to rocket squads.

DEATH AT DINNER

The Ashqar family was eating dinner when the rocket slammed
into its home. An anti-pullout rally attended by thousands of
right-wing Israelis just across the border in the town of
Sderot was the apparent target.

Nisreen al-Ashqar, Yasser’s sister-in-law, said she
survived because she had left the dinner table to fetch bread.

“As I climbed the stairs, I heard a boom. I rushed down and
saw everybody was bleeding,” she told Reuters at the house,
where nine people were wounded by the rocket.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has pressed militants
to lay low to avoid upsetting Israel’s withdrawal, the first
time it would be dismantling settlements on some of the
territory that Palestinians want for a state.

But an Islamic Jihad spokesman said the order of restraint
applied just to rockets, not to “other forms of resistance”
against what he called “Zionist crimes.”

Hamas, the biggest and most powerful militant faction, says
it has launched no rockets since July 19, while smaller
factions some linked to Abbas’s Fatah movement, have also gone
quiet.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad are both sworn to destroying
Israel, which has threatened a large-scale ground offensive in
Gaza if Palestinian militants open fire during the pullout.

Israel intends to evacuate all 8,500 settlers from Gaza,
territory Prime Minister Ariel Sharon says the Jewish state has
no chance of keeping in any future peace deal.

A few hundred of the 230,000 settlers in the West Bank are
also due to be removed, but Sharon has pledged Israel will hold
on to major settlement blocs in the area forever.

The World Court has described Israeli settlement on land
occupied in the 1967 Middle East war as illegal. Israel
disputes this.