GAZA CITY/RAMALLAH, 12 December 2007 — Israeli tanks and bulldozers backed by attack aircraft moved into the southern Gaza Strip yesterday, killing six fighters in the widest operation in the territory since Islamic Hamas forces wrested control in June. The violence took place on the eve of the first formal peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians since early 2001. The Israeli military described it as a routine operation “against the terror infrastructure” in Gaza.
But the scene on the ground — bodies lying amid the rubble of a destroyed building, Israeli tanks pushing deep into Palestinian territory, schoolchildren scurrying for cover — looked anything but routine. Palestinian officials accused Israel of trying to sabotage the peace talks. Five fighters were killed in southern Gaza where around 30 Israeli tanks pushed three kilometers into the sector, which local residents said was the deepest Israeli invasion since Hamas seized power six months ago. An Israeli tank shell killed three members of Islamic Jihad — Mohammed Abu Hamra, Ibrahim Barud and Jihad Al-Aswad, all in their 20s, the group said.
An Israeli airstrike killed Omar Khalil, 23, from the armed Popular Resistance Committees in the south near Rafah, a town that straddles the Gaza-Egypt border. Hamas fighter Mahmoud Abu Mustafa died in hospital following an Israeli air raid in the same area, while an Islamic Jihad fighter was killed in another such attack near Gaza’s northern town of Beit Hanun, Palestinian medics said.
Israeli troops cut traffic on the main road dissecting Gaza from north to south and encountered fierce resistance from Palestinian fighters, the medics and witnesses said.
Israeli soldiers detained dozens of suspected fighters as they conducted house-to-house searches in the area, witnesses said. Palestinian officials said the invasion into Gaza was Israel’s largest in months in terms of the number of Israeli troops and materiel involved and the distance penetrated into the impoverished territory.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas adviser Nabil Abu Rudeina described the killings as a “terrible crime aiming to abort peace negotiations before they start.”
Abu Rudeina said in a press statement that “The insistence of the Israeli government to resume it’s policy of incursions, assassinations and settlement enforces doubts regarding the Israeli intentions toward bringing the negotiations which are due to start tomorrow to success.”
Meanwhile, the secretary-general of Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), Yasser Abed Rabbo, said that final status issues of Israeli-Palestinian conflict couldn’t be seriously treated as long as Israel continues settlement expansion in West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Abed Rabbo, also member of Palestinian negotiations team, told Voice of Palestine Radio that the “serious doors to deal with the final status issues can not be open in the shadow of the Israeli settlement.”
