JABALIA, Gaza Strip, 5 November — Israeli helicopters and ground-to-ground missiles blasted metal works and other plants in the Gaza Strip which the Israeli Army said were being used as illegal arms factories before dawn yesterday.
The US-made Apache helicopters fired five missiles at two factories and two workshops in Jabalia, just north of Gaza City, followed by a salvo of around eight ground-to-ground missiles, Palestinian sources and witnesses said.
Local resident Muhammad Abu Warda said a huge explosion split the night. "It was a terrible sound. My kids were scared. We heard the sound of helicopters and after that rocketing. The ground-to-ground missiles came from the direction of Beit Hanun," near the administrative boundary with Israel, Abu Warda said.
Riyad Muhammad Massood, 32, the owner of a carpentry shop that was hit in the strike, said: "I was sleeping when it happened at 4:30 in the morning. I heard the bombing, but I didn’t see it. "I lost $9,000," he added. In his small workshop, light shone through a gaping hole in the concrete ceiling, while the cement floor was strewn with blackened machine tools and burned planks of wood.
The workshops were just 100 meters from the Abu Bakr Siddiq mosque in Jabalia, which residents described as the center for the Hamas Islamic resistance movement in the sprawling town just to the north of Gaza City.
The hail of missiles also hit an aluminum production plant, where the rockets destroyed heavy machinery like compressors and casting equipment and the tin roofs were blown away. Factory managers said the night watchman had been sleeping on a couch in the office of the wood workshop when the missile strike began. The office was scattered with debris, which also covered a blanket lying on the couch.
Nabil Abu Rudeina, a top aide of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, said the strikes were "an Israeli escalation to destroy all the international and Arab offers to find a way out of the crisis."
A Palestinian gunman opened fire on an Israeli bus in occupied East Jerusalem yesterday, killing two passengers and injuring 45 before Israeli security forces shot him dead. The attack came just hours before what the Israeli forces said were due to quit the area around the Palestinian self-rule town of Qalqilya in the northern West Bank. Israeli ministers said the Jerusalem shooting would not derail the pullout, but Palestinian gunmen later fired on an army post on the edge of Qalqilya, further endangering a withdrawal. Four of the injured on the bus were in a serious condition after the gunman sprayed the bus with automatic rifle fire, blasting out windows and peppering the body work.
