GAZA: Four Palestinian fighters were killed in an Israeli airstrike near Gaza City yesterday morning, hours after Palestinian fighters launched rockets at Israeli border towns. Medical sources and witnesses said that the four Palestinians killed in the airstrike were members of Al-Nasser brigades, the military wing of the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC).
The violence was the latest in a surge of spiraling clashes that have rocked a 5-month-old truce between Israel and Hamas. Both sides say they would like to preserve the Egyptian-mediated truce, which is due to expire next month, but events over the past two weeks signal the opposite is happening.
Meanwhile, Interim Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert accused Hamas yesterday of “shattering” the Gaza truce.
Olmert told the weekly Cabinet meeting that Israel could not stand idly by while it came under repeated rocket fire and said he had ordered security chiefs to draw up action plans against Hamas’ 17-month-old rule in Gaza.
Hamas roundly rejected the Israeli premier’s comments, dismissing them as “media manipulation” which had “no basis in reality”.
“It is our right to respond firmly to any Zionist aggression against Palestinians,” the movement’s spokesman Fawzi Barhum said.
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak has also threatened a ground offensive in the Gaza Strip if the rocket fire continues. Yesterday morning Israel Radio quoted him as saying that the situation in the border area was “intolerable” and could not continue.
Israel’s security forces were standing ready for a strong and painful operation on the other side of the border, Barak said in a speech on Saturday evening.
Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who is currently in the United States, said on Saturday that Israel would intensify its response if the attacks resulted in any victims.
Meanwhile, Syrian President Bashar Assad has called for Arab League action to help break Israel’s siege of the Gaza Strip.
— With input from agencies
