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No rocket fire before pullout - Islamic Jihad

Posted on: Wednesday, 3 August 2005, 07:57 CDT

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.

Source: REUTERS

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