GAZA CITY, 1 August 2006 — Palestinian fighters vowed to hit back and step up their attacks against Israel as Israeli artillery killed a teenager in the Gaza Strip yesterday.
The artillery fire in the northern town of Beit Hanoun killed Nahid Al-Shambary, 17, by hitting his home, and lightly wounded a two-year-old in a nearby house, doctors said.
The Israeli Army said the attack was conducted against fighters who were launching rockets at Israel, including one that hit a town in the south of the country yesterday, causing no casualties.
On June 28, Israel launched a military offensive in the Gaza Strip to stop fighters firing rockets and to retaliate for an attack on an army outpost that resulted in the death of two Israeli soldiers and the capture of a third.
Israel’s Gaza offensive has killed nearly 160 Palestinians and destroyed farmland, houses, government buildings, water pipes and electric lines in the territory. In a series of interviews yesterday, Palestinian fighters vowed revenge for the offensive, and threatened bombings to pay Israel back for an airstrike in Qana, south Lebanon, that killed 60 civilians, including 37 children, on Sunday.
Abu Ahmad, spokesman for the Al-Quds Brigade, the armed wing of Islamic Jihad, said his organization had urged all its field leaders to conduct as many bombings as possible. He said the orders were initially issued after the last three days of bloody fighting in the Gaza Strip. “But now it is more urgent. The time won’t be long before we’ll hear news of the first bombers,” he said. Abu Ahmad said rocket attacks will continue against Israel “as conditions allow. When we can fire them, we’ll do it.”
Abu Qusay, from the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the armed wing of the Palestinian group Fatah, said his group intended to launch “a new campaign for the victory of the Palestinians and the Lebanese.” “We will fire even more rockets toward Israel,” he said.
Sami Abu Zuhri, a spokesman for the Islamic group Hamas, which dominates the Palestinian government, said: “There will be an increase in resistance action to prevent a continuation of these massacres.”
Meanwhile, a senior Palestinian official warned that increasing violence was sidelining moderates, and reinforcing radicals.
Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, told the French newspaper Le Monde that “moderate Palestinians like me are losing during this crisis” by being drowned out by the violence.
“How to make oneself heard on this point to a people that have long lost all hope? It’s too late. Hamas is in power. And what is happening in Lebanon only reinforces this tendency,” Erekat was quoted as saying.
He said the United States should not “continue to treat Israel like a state above the law.”
Earlier yesterday another Palestinian man, 32-year-old Yussef Maghari, died of wounds he sustained during a July 19 Israeli air raid on the Mughazi refugee camp in central Gaza.
In another development, the Gaza Strip’s Rafah border crossing with Egypt will reopen for 48 hours beginning today for the second time during Israel’s month-long offensive in the coastal strip, officials said. “We have agreed with European observers to open Rafah tomorrow (Tuesday) for two days to allow people from Gaza to leave,” Erekat said.
A spokeswoman for European Union observers, who help monitor the border crossing, confirmed to AFP that “the border will very likely open” today and tomorrow.
“There is a 90 percent chance that it will open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.,” she said.
Rafah is Gaza’s only border crossing that bypasses Israel. It was closed by the Jewish state on June 25. Since then, the Rafah border crossing has been open just once, on July 18 and 19, to allow Palestinians stranded in Egypt to cross back into the Gaza Strip.
Last November, two months after Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip following a 38-year occupation, the Rafah border crossing began operating under an Israeli-Palestinian agreement brokered by the United States and allowing for EU monitors.
— With input from agencies
