GAZA CITY, 5 June — The military branch of Hamas resistance movement and an armed Fatah group announced a truce yesterday, conditional on Israel’s acceptance of a withdrawal from the occupied territories. “We are going to stop our operations in our lands which are occupied since 1948 as of Monday midnight (2100 GMT) ... to give the Israeli people a chance to ask their government to stop their terror against our people ... and withdraw from our occupied land”, the two groups said in a joint statement issued in Gaza City.
The document is signed by the Ezzeddin Al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of the Islamist Hamas movement, and by the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a branch of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction. However, the statement vows “attacks will continue in the occupied Gaza Strip, West Bank and East Jerusalem”, explaining it did not “contradict Arafat’s cease-fire order since Israeli tanks continue to patrol our territories and the aviation to fly over them, which gives us the right to defend ourselves”.
The two groups, which gave no deadline for the truce, warned that if the hawkish Israeli Prime Minister Ariel “Sharon and his blood-thirsty government do not stop their assassination and invasion threats, no Zionist will be safe”. The Ezzeddin Al-Qassam Brigades claimed responsibility for the suicide attack that killed 21 in Tel Aviv on Friday night.
Israel was enforcing its tightest blockades of Palestinian areas since the Palestinian uprising began eight months ago, crippling movement and business in the West Bank and Gaza. Fuel was running out fast in Gaza. There were urgent international efforts to foster a truce and fend off Israeli retaliation for Friday’s suicide bombing. “We’ve been demanding for a long time that Arafat prevent terrorism... If he doesn’t do it, we will,” Israeli Cabinet Secretary Gideon Saar said.
A fierce gunbattle flared yesterday as Israeli troops attacked Palestinian activists and threw grenades in southern Gaza, Palestinian witnesses and Israeli military officials said. Twenty Palestinians were wounded before the attack subsided at nightfall. Palestinians accused troops of firing randomly into the Yebna refugee camp. “The Israelis are going crazy,” a resident said after bullets shattered the windows of his house.
Sharon told a Likud party meeting: “(Arafat’s) Palestinian Authority and those that head it are taking part in terror and violence and it is not preventing terror and violence.” Israeli government sources say Sharon’s Cabinet has already approved details of a military onslaught on Palestinian targets which will be launched at once if it gives up hope of a truce. Sharon said publicly an “operational plan” was ready.
Arafat’s security chiefs met to discuss the cease-fire with representatives of nine Palestine Liberation Organization factions, including Fatah, and with non-PLO Islamic groups, such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. “The Palestinian side is handling the cease-fire according to President Arafat’s instructions,” the PA spokesman Tayyib Abdel Rahman said.
