GAZA CITY, 11 June 2007 — Israeli jets pounded targets in Gaza City in pre-dawn airstrikes yesterday as Prime Minister Ehud Olmert vowed to continue to hit Gaza, hours after Palestinian gunmen breached Israel’s heavily fortified border and clashed with troops in an unsuccessful attempt to capture a soldier.
Fighting between rival Palestinian militant groups, meanwhile, spread in the southern Gaza Strip, further weakening a shaky truce forged in the face of punishing Israeli air assaults.
“Our operations in Gaza will continue as long as the rocket fire and the terror attacks continue,” Olmert said at the weekly Cabinet meeting. Olmert did not say if Israeli military strikes in Gaza would increase, after fighters drove to a border fence in a jeep, breached it and attacked an army post on the other side.
The post was unmanned at the time, but exchanges of fire with troops sent to the scene left one fighter dead while three others made it back inside Gaza. The army did not report any casualties.
The raid near the Kissufim crossing was carried out jointly by Islamic Jihad and Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a group loosely linked to President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party.
It was the first cross-border raid since a June 25, 2006 operation in which fighters tunneled out of Gaza and attacked an army post, killing two soldiers and seizing a third, Cpl. Gilad Shalit, who remains in captivity.
Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz said the latest raid was also aimed at capturing a soldier. Olmert called it an attempt to “further complicate the situation.”
“The central objective of the terrorist organizations was to hit Israel, to carry out a kidnapping and in this way to put us into difficulties,” Peretz told public radio.
Olmert and the Palestinian journalists union condemned the use of a white jeep allegedly plastered with press insignia, photos of which were published in Israeli dailies, but the groups denied the charge.
“Yesterday terrorists used a car with TV insignia in order to confuse the soldiers and take advantage of our special sensitivity as a democratic country to allow the media to work in these sensitive areas,” Olmert said.
In a statement in Gaza, the Palestinian journalists union said: “Using a car with press insignia puts in danger journalists’ lives and gives an excuse to occupation forces to target and kill journalists.”
But a spokesman for Islamic Jihad’s armed wing, the Al-Quds Brigades, repeated the group’s assertion that the vehicle used was camouflaged to resemble an Israeli Army one. “The Al-Quds Brigades used an armored jeep resembling military armored jeeps used by the Zionist intelligence services,” Abu Ahmed told AFP.
He accused the Israeli Army of placing the press markings on the vehicle that the fighters abandoned at the border fence before it then allowed photographers access to the site.
Israel carried out an air raid early yesterday against Islamic Jihad offices in Gaza City wounding two people, medics said. Israel has been pounding targets in Gaza since May 16, when after a six-month cease-fire it resumed raids in response to an increase in rocket fire from the territory.
A member of the Fatah movement was thrown off the roof of an 18-story building yesterday amid renewed clashes between rival factions across Gaza.
Mohammed Suwerki was kidnapped near the seafront in Gaza moments before he was flung to his death from the roof of a building by Hamas fighters.
— With input from agencies
