GAZA CITY: A Palestinian fighter died in a clash with Israeli troops and Israeli aircraft struck two targets in Gaza early yesterday as mediators tried to firm up a long-term Gaza cease-fire a day before Israelis go to the polls in a national election.
The Islamic Jihad said that one of its fighters was killed overnight in an Israeli airstrike. The Israeli military said troops spotted an armed fighter trying to cross the Gaza-Israel border late Sunday and opened fire, after which a bomb belt he was wearing detonated.
Israeli aircraft struck two fighter positions in the territory early yesterday, in what the military said was retaliation for rocket fire from Gaza on Sunday. No injuries were reported in the aerial attacks.
Riad Malki, foreign minister in the Palestinian government based in the West Bank and headed by Mahmoud Abbas, a Hamas rival, charged yesterday that Hamas was trying to influence the outcome of today’s Israeli elections by continuing to fire rockets into southern Israel.
Hamas doesn’t want to see a pro-peace government elected because it would pursue a political deal with Abbas, Malki said during a visit to Poland.
Abbas’ government is “very much worried” that the rocket attacks might “really push Israeli public opinion and the voters to vote for an anti-peace government,” he told reporters in Warsaw. The violence coincided with stepped-up efforts by the two sides to anchor a shaky cease-fire that ended Israel’s devastating three-week offensive, which aimed at halting the rocket fire. Israel unilaterally ended its offensive on Jan. 18, and Gaza’s Hamas rulers announced their own cease-fire the same day.
Hamas is seeking to get Gaza’s blockaded border crossings open, while Israel wants an end to arms smuggling into the territory and the return of a soldier captured by Hamas in June, 2006. The talks are being mediated by Egypt, as the sides will not communicate directly with each other. A delegation of Hamas leaders from Gaza was in Damascus yesterday to consult with the organization’s exiled leadership there, and was expected to travel to Cairo later in the day.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said yesterday that a longer-term truce between Israel and Hamas could come into effect as early as next week. Mubarak was speaking in Paris after briefing his French counterpart Nicolas Sarkozy on Cairo’s efforts to mediate a truce in the Gaza conflict through indirect talks.
Mubarak said he had asked the French leader to co-preside at a donors’ conference for the reconstruction of Gaza in Cairo on March 2. Egypt invited rival Palestinian factions to a conference in Cairo this month, a Palestinian official said yesterday.
