GAZA CITY, May 12: The radical movement Hamas vowed on Sunday to press on with attacks against Israel, defying mounting pressure from the Palestinian Authority to stop their suicide bombings and give international efforts to revive the peace process a chance.

“Our plan is very simple: maintaining the (Israeli) occupation means pursuing the resistance. We will continue to resist the occupation until it ends,” said senior Hamas political leader Abdul Aziz al-Rantissi in Gaza City, after Israel had scrapped plans to attack the Gaza Strip for a Tuesday suicide bombing.

Asked whether conducting suicide attacks in Israel would not systematically provoke violent Israeli retaliations, Rantissi said that Hamas’ attacks were in answer to “the crimes perpetrated by the Zionist entity.”

“They have killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians and we are blamed for killing a dozen Israeli army reservists who are presented by Israelis as civilians,” he said.

Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat last Wednesday ordered his security forces to prevent “terrorist operations” against Israeli civilians following a suicide attack near Tel Aviv, claimed by Hamas, which left 16 Israeli dead.

Israel had massed its tanks and troops on the edge of the Gaza border for a repeat of its West Bank invasion last month — also triggered by a Hamas suicide bombing — but later decided to stay its hand.

The Israeli press said the attack was frozen because the element of surprise had been lost and owing to disagreements inside Israel’s military command on the magnitude of the offensive. It was also rumoured that Washington brought its influence to bear.

Rantissi said Israel targeted “Palestinian resistance fighters,” rather than Arafat’s Palestinian Authority in its month-long offensive on the West Bank that started on March 29 following a Hamas attack that killed 29 Israelis.

“The Zionist offensive on the West Bank targeted the resistance and nobody thought of destroying the Authority, which is pressured to act as the Zionist entity’s policeman,” in the Palestinian territories, he said.

Aware of the negative impact abroad of attacks inside Israel, Palestinian cabinet secretary Ahmed Abdel Rahman called on all Palestinian factions Sunday, including Hamas, to limit their operations to the West Bank and Gaza.

“In the Palestinian people’s current situation, all the factions must realize the necessity of limiting the resistance to the territories of 1967,” Abdel Rahman said.

He said that such attacks only helped “isolate the Palestinian people on the international scene,” he said.

He said such a strategy will allow Palestinians to “win the battle” against Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who “uses (Palestinian) attacks in Israel to mobilize international public opinion, notably in the United States, against the Palestinian people.”

Without explicitly referring to suicide attacks, Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak, Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad and Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz expressed their “sincere” hopes for peace with Israel and rejected “violence in all its forms,” Saturday at mini-summit held in Egypt.

Their stance was deemed “encouraging” by Israel.

But their increasingly conciliatory stance was dismissed by Ismail Abu Shanab, another top Hamas political leader in the Gaza Strip.

“Arab leaders and all those who call for halting martyr operations against Zionists should first stop the Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people,” he said.

“Suicide attacks are a specific type of resistance to which we resort when aggressions and massacres against our innocent civilians intensify,” he added.

Abu Shanab, considered to be one of the more moderate Hamas leaders, vowed to “pursue the resistance in all it forms and by all means on every inch of Palestinian land.”

For Palestinian Legislative Council member (PLC) Ziad Abu Amr, “Hamas’ continuation of the holy struggle is not very convincing when they know ahead of time that there will be retaliations, especially after what happened on the West Bank.

“Without abandoning their strategic choice of resistance, Hamas and other groups will have to think rationally, they need to have plan when what they do hurts Palestinians more than the enemy,” he said.—AFP