JERUSALEM, 1 August 2004 — Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz has given “carte blanche” to the army to “ prevent Palestinian rocket attacks” on Israeli territory from the Gaza Strip, military radio said yesterday.

Mofaz took the decision in talks with army officials following fresh attacks on the southern Israeli city of Sderot, across the border from Gaza.

The reported decision has not been officially confirmed. Four rockets struck the Sderot area on Friday, with no reports of casualties. Early yesterday another rocket fired from northern Gaza exploded in a field near the city, Israeli military sources said.

The Palestinian resistance group Hamas claimed responsibility for the first two rocket strikes, saying the attacks would continue until the Israeli Army ended its occupation of the town of Beit Hanun.

Israeli soldiers opened fire yesterday on some 200 Palestinian women and children demonstrating in the reoccupied northern Gaza town of Beit Hanun, wounding a child, an AFP correspondent said.

The protesters shouted slogans against the Israeli Army’s operation in Beit Hanun and demanding food and medicine for the inhabitants of the town, where Israeli soldiers deployed in late June in operations to prevent rocket attacks on Israeli territory.

At least 60 Qassam rockets have been fired from northern Gaza since the start of the Israeli operation in Beit Hanun, 42 of them exploding in Israeli territory, military radio said.

Israel took over Beit Hanun on June 29 in a bid to prevent militants from firing rockets into southern Israel after a strike killed two people, including a three-year-old child, in Sderot.

The Palestinian Authority has declared Beit Hanun a “disaster area” and the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) has organized food deliveries to the besieged community.

The Israeli government was to examine today the creation of financial compensation measures for a dozen southern Israeli towns which have found themselves in the firing line of Palestinian rockets, military radio said.

Israel’s defense minister said in early July that Israeli troops would remain in Beit Hanun until the planned Israeli pullout from the territory in late 2005.

On Friday, more than 1,000 Palestinians demonstrated in the nearby towns of Jabaliya and Beit Lahia against the reoccupation of Beit Hanun.

The Jabaliya protest was called by the radical Islamic group Hamas, which claimed responsibility for rocket attacks Friday and Saturday on the Israeli town of Sderot across the border.

In response to Friday’s strikes on Sderot, an Israeli helicopter destroyed a metal workshop belonging to the father of a suicide bomber in Gaza City late Friday, slightly wounding two people, Palestinian security said.

An Israeli military official said Hamas used the workshop to produce its makeshift Qassam rockets, which have a range of about 10 kilometers and can pack about five kilograms of explosives. They are named after the armed wing of Hamas, the Ezzeddin Al-Qassam Brigades.

Ambulances and firefighters rushed to the area and asked people to get away from the targeted building. Medical sources said that no injuries had been reported. Ambulance drivers also confirmed that there were no injuries.

Israel has been destroying metal workshops in the Gaza Strip saying that they are manufacturing homemade rockets that militant are using in attacks against Israel.

The metal workshop struck by the helicopters is in a first floor of a building in the neighborhood and is owned by Saleh Reyashi, the father of Reem Reyashi, residents said.

Reyashi was a 22-year-old suicide bomber and a member of the Hamas who blew herself up at Erez crossing on the border of the northern Gaza Strip and Israel on January 14, killing herself and four Israelis.

Reyashi was married and mother of three. Her death had left many questions on how a woman and a mother could carry out a suicide bombing.

Also on Friday, Israeli soldiers shot dead a Palestinian youth and wounded 14 other Palestinians, some seriously, at funerals in the south of the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian hospital spokesman said.

The soldiers had fired at the mourners, he said. The Palestinians were burying the Fatah group leader Omer Abu Setta and his assistant Zaki Abu Zarqa, who were killed Thursday in an Israeli missile attack.

The Palestinian attorney general, meanwhile, is looking into claims local firms sold cement to Israelis building a West Bank wall that Palestinians condemn as a land grab, a lawmaker said yesterday.

Hassan Khreisheh said the probe would look into suspicions that some Palestinian Authority officials and ministers have allowed Palestinian companies to make millions of dollars by selling 420,000 tons of cement to Israeli firms at high profit.

Khreisheh, who says he received death threats to scare him off the case, told Reuters: “The attorney general has started investigating the file we submitted on selling cement to Israelis that goes into building the wall.”

A parliamentary committee found in June that at least four Palestinian companies had sold cement imported from Egypt to Israeli firms constructing homes in Jewish settlements built on West Bank land Israel occupied in the 1967 Middle East War.

Other inquiries found that the imported cement was also used to build the wall, which cuts off thousands of Palestinians from schools, hospitals, farms, markets and cities.

The investigation was ordered by Palestinian President Yasser Arafat in recent days at a time when he has come under increasing pressure from his Fatah movement and internationally, to implement administrative reform and crack down on corruption.

Khreisheh said they had videotaped evidence of such activities. “The Palestinian companies bought the cement for $22 (per ton) and sold it to Israeli firms for $100... The profits went into their pockets, not the budget,” Khreisheh added.

The inquiry had no proof the cement was used to build the wall, but had uncovered “a report sent to Arafat dated Sept. 11, 2003, from the Palestinian Authority’s auditor Jarrar Al-Qidweh which said the cement was used for building the wall,” Khreisheh said.

Of the threats to his life, he said: “The threats from these people, these gangs, will not scare me. I will pursue my work to defend the cause of my people who are killed during protests against the wall.”