GAZA CITY, 10 December 2005 — Israel pounded the Gaza Strip with artillery fire yesterday and arrested 19 Palestinian activists. In the evening top Hamas official Khaled Meshaal told a rally in Damascus that the group’s nine-month-old truce with Israel had ended but minutes later a Hamas spokesman clarified here that the truce stood.
In the days since Monday’s bombing, which killed five people in the coastal city of Netanya, Israel has killed three activists in airstrikes on the Gaza Strip and rounded up dozens of others in the West Bank.
The army said it carried out an arrest sweep on Thursday night near Tulkarm in the northern West Bank. Ten of the suspects belonged to Islamic Jihad, which carried out the attack, the army said.
Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas has also ordered the arrests of those involved in the bombing. Islamic Jihad leaders say Palestinian security forces have rounded up more than 80 members, including three commanders arrested yesterday in the village of Monday’s bomber. Palestinian officials have confirmed only 17 arrests.
Abu Majd, an Islamic Jihad spokesman in the northern West Bank, said the Palestinian crackdown had weakened his group. “These people are not our top members, but these arrests still affect us,” he said. He said those arrested including low-level operatives, university leaders and even high school students.
Yesterday’s Israeli firing came a day after an airstrike killed two Palestinian activists holed up in a house in the northern Gaza Strip, and a Palestinian man fatally stabbed an Israeli soldier at a checkpoint in the West Bank. The army closed the Qalandia checkpoint — used by thousands of Palestinians to enter Jerusalem each day — after the stabbing. Military officers said the closure would remain in effect for several days.
Mushir Al-Masri, spokesman for Hamas in Gaza, said: “Hamas confirms that calm is still on, as of this moment, and this is a national consensus. This is the official and final Hamas decision and position.”
Earlier, Meshaal told a the Damascus rally: “The truce period that we had in the past is enough. There is no room for truce. I say to our brothers in the (Palestinian) Authority that we are witnessing political stagnation.”
Meanwhile, a group of Palestinians has brought a class action lawsuit against the former head of Israel’s internal security service over an airstrike in Gaza that killed 15 civilians, eight of them children.
The lawsuit, which was filed Thursday at a New York court, names former Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter for his part in the air raid in July 2002 which saw the Israeli Air Force dropping a one-ton bomb on a densely populated neighborhood.
— Additional input from agencies
