Senior Islamic Jihad commander killed in Gaza blast

By Nidal al-Mughrabi

GAZA (Reuters) – Islamic Jihad’s most senior commander in
the Gaza Strip was killed on Wednesday by an explosion that
tore through his car, the Palestinian militant group said,
blaming the Israeli army, which denied involvement.

In the occupied West Bank, Palestinian gunmen shot dead an
Israeli outside a Jewish settlement, the army said.

Witnesses to the death of Abu al-Waleed al-Dahdouh, head of
Islamic Jihad’s armed wing in the Gaza Strip, said his car blew
up as he opened one of its doors and that an Israeli military
aircraft was flying overhead at the time.

“The Israeli army did not operate in Gaza,” a military
spokeswoman said. “It wasn’t us.”

Describing Dahdouh’s death as an assassination, Nabil Abu
Rdainah, a spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas,
called for international pressure on Israel to return to the
negotiating table.

Prospects for a resumption of peacemaking have dimmed since
the Islamic militant group Hamas, which is sworn to Israel’s
destruction, scored a crushing victory over Abbas’s Fatah
faction in a January 25 election.

The Israeli army has acknowledged killing dozens of
militants in strikes in the Gaza Strip since a Palestinian
uprising began in 2000. Dozens of gunmen have also died when
explosives they were transporting detonated prematurely.

Chanting “revenge, revenge,” hundreds of Islamic Jihad
gunmen gathered outside Gaza’s Shifa Hospital after hearing
that Dahdouh’s body had been brought there.

“This is an Israeli assassination that killed one of our
most important commanders,” said Khader Habib, an Islamic Jihad
leader.

Abu Adallah, a spokesman for the group, said: “Our rockets
will rain down on (Israelis). Islamic Jihad’s armed wing will
not remain silent and will respond with all its might to avenge
the death of its leader.”

Dahdouh was killed hours after militants in Gaza fired a
rocket toward the Israeli coastal town of Ashkelon.

Israeli interim Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has pledged in
the run-up to a March 28 general election to take strong
measures against militant groups behind such attacks.

At the entrance to the Jewish settlement of Migdalim in the
West Bank, two Palestinian gunmen shot an Israeli in the head,
killing him, a military spokeswoman.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the
attack at a petrol station on a main road.

(Additional reporting by Jonathan Saul, Megan Goldin and
Tali Caspi in Jerusalem and Mohammed Assadi in Ramallah)