GAZA CITY, 24 September 2005 — An explosion at a Hamas rally in a Gaza refugee camp yesterday killed 10 people and injured at least 85, some of them seriously. The blast in a pickup truck carrying Hamas fighters in the Jabaliya refugee camp happened hours after Palestinians fired rockets into Israel. The Palestinian firing was in retaliation to the killing of three Islamic Jihad activists by Israeli forces in a raid on a refugee camp in the West Bank town of Tulkarm earlier in the day.
Hamas blamed Israel for the Jabaliya explosion but the Israeli military denied involvement and the Palestinian Interior Ministry said the blast was set off by the mishandling of explosives.
The rally was one of the last military-style parades before a ban on flaunting weapons in public — agreed to by all militant groups — is to go into effect this evening.
Witnesses said participants, including many children, crowded around the pickup truck when the explosion occurred. They said the truck carried two homemade rockets.
After the blast, men carried bloody body parts and lifeless bodies wrapped in blankets to nearby cars. The dead and wounded were taken to nearby hospitals. At Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital, doctors had to treat patients on the floor of the emergency room because they ran out of beds. Masked Hamas men wheeled in casualties, including children.
Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said “an Israeli drone fired several rockets at a convoy of cars participating in the parade, creating a large number of martyrs and injured. This is an abominable Israeli crime.”
Exacerbating tension between Israel and the Palestinians in the run-up to the fifth anniversary of the Palestinian intifada, Israeli troops shot dead three Islamic Jihad activists. The three, wanted in Israel, were killed by the soldiers who raided the refugee camp early yesterday.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas condemned the raid as “very serious” while speaking to reporters in the West Bank town of Ramallah. “We are trying to keep the calm, but unfortunately the Israelis resort to this totally unjustified behavior,” he said.
Palestinian activists have been largely adhering to an informal truce in anti-Israeli attacks since Abbas was elected in January.
— Additional input from agencies
