GAZA, Nov 1: Israel killed two Palestinian militant commanders in a missile strike in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, triggering vows to ‘open the gates of hell’ for revenge attacks against the Jewish state.
A week of bloodshed, including the killing of five Israelis in a suicide bombing on Wednesday, has deflated hopes that Israel’s Gaza pullout in September would revive peacemaking.
Striking inside Jabalya, Gaza’s biggest refugee camp, an Israeli aircraft destroyed a car carrying Hassan al-Madhoun, an Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades commander, and Fawzi Abu al-Qarea, leader of Hamas’s armed wing in the camp.
Madhoun, 32, and Qarea, 37, were killed instantly and at least 10 people were wounded, medics said. Witnesses said the car bore a red Palestinian Authority security licence plate.
The attack came minutes after Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas arrived in the coastal territory apparently seeking to restore calm amid the worst flare-up of violence since he engineered a truce nearly nine month ago.
Over the past week, Israel has carried out numerous strikes against militants in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, killing 13 Palestinians, most of them gunmen.
The Israeli attacks followed an Islamic Jihad suicide bombing in an Israeli coastal town and cross-border rocket fire by the group, which said it was avenging Israel’s killing of a West Bank commander on Oct. 24.
“This assassination will open the gates of hell on the enemy,” Islamic Jihad, a group sworn to Israel’s destruction, said after Tuesday’s strike.
Islamic Jihad had expressed a readiness on Sunday to halt rocket fire if air raids stopped, but Israeli officials pledged to press ahead with a military campaign against militant groups.
“When there will be a let-up in terrorist attacks, when the Palestinian Authority decides finally to take action against these groups, to disarm them ... then we will not have to bring justice to them,” said Raanan Gissin, a spokesman for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Gissin said Madhoun and Qarea ‘were about to go out and prepare a terrorist attack’ and had cooperated before in bombings and other strikes that killed 21 Israelis.
Abbas resisted US and Israeli calls to disarm gunmen, citing fears of civil war.
Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, part of Abbas’s Fatah faction, said after the missile attack it had ordered all its cells ‘to strike the enemy everywhere’.
Hamas, which had largely stayed on the sidelines in the latest outbreak of violence, said it ‘will not stand handcuffed’.
