GAZA CITY, 17 February 2003 — Six Hamas activists were killed yesterday when an explosion ripped through a house in Gaza, a blast which a leading Hamas official blamed on Israel.
The Hamas deaths came as two Palestinians were shot dead in clashes in the northern West Bank city of Nablus, where Israeli forces swooped in to arrest a senior official of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
The six, all members of the Hamas’ armed wing the Ezzedin Al-Qassam Brigades, were identified by Hamas leader Ismail Haniya as Mohammed Selmi, Mofid El-Bol, Akram Nassar, Nidal Farhat, Iyad Shaladan and Ayman Mohanna.
Several other people were wounded in the explosion in the house in the El Zeitoun neighborhood in the eastern part of Gaza City, medics said.
Hamas leader Abdelaziz Al-Rantissi said Israel was behind the “assassination” of the Palestinians.
“This is a terrorist operation, 100 percent a Zionist assassination,” he told AFP. “The Zionist occupier will pay a heavy price for this.” Palestinian police said they were still investigating the cause of the blast, while the Israeli Army declined to comment.
Israel radio and television commentators said it was impossible to exclude an Israeli operation against the Hamas members, whose organization has spearheaded bombings and fired crude home-made missiles into southern Israel.
Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz told a weekly Cabinet meeting earlier yesterday his troops would hit hard at Hamas in Gaza after the hard-line group claimed an explosion Saturday which destroyed an Israeli tank, killing four soldiers, in northern Gaza.
“Israel will land a serious blow against the Hamas infrastructure in the Gaza Strip,” he said.
The tank explosion was also claimed by the tandem of Islamic Jihad and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an offshoot of Yasser Arafat’s nationalist Fatah movement. Despite the competing claims, Israel pointed the finger firmly at Hamas.
Meanwhile in Nablus, two Palestinians were shot dead in an Israeli raid which netted Taysir Khaled, a member of the PLO’s executive committee and also a member of the politburo of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP).
Exchanges of fire erupted after a crowd of around 100 stone-throwing youths pelted Israeli armor that had surrounded Khaled’s office in the city center.
The two men slain were identified as Mohammed Takruri, 35, and Ayman Abu Zunt, 20. Both men were shot in the head.
Samir Ghoshe, a PLO executive committee member in charge of the Jerusalem dossier, said that Khaled was the second PLO committee member arrested after Abdul Rahim Mallouh, deputy secretary-general of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), who was grabbed last June.
Ghoshe said that the arrests were a flagrant violation of the 1993 Oslo peace accords signed between Israel and the PLO and which guaranteed executive committee members freedom of movement when they returned to the territories.
Israeli troops also arrested three members of Fatah movement in operations in Hebron in the southern West Bank, Palestinian officials said.
In another development, Israel indefinitely extended its closure of the Palestinian territories yesterday, but at the same time allowed a Palestinian delegation to head to London talks with an Israeli team. (The Independent)
