JABALIYA REFUGEE CAMP, Nov 2: Hamas vowed on Wednesday to call off an informal truce at the year-end, as thousands rallied at the funerals of two Palestinian commando leaders killed in an Israeli air raid.
Bloodshed also gripped the northern West Bank where Israeli troops shot dead a member of the radical Palestinian group Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades just hours after militants had killed an Israeli soldier in the same area.
“The quiet will finish at the end of this year,” spokesman Mushir al Masri said at the funerals in Gaza’s impoverished Jabaliya refugee camp.
He said militant groups which signed up to the informal truce in Cairo last March agreed at the time to review the situation before the new year.
“No one should dream there will be another quiet,” when faced with escalating violence from Israel, Mr Masri warned.
Hamas, the most powerful group in Gaza, warned on Tuesday that Israel had ‘started a war’ by killing a local leader of its military wing along with an Al Aqsa commander.
Palestinian fighters on Wednesday shot dead an Israeli soldier near the West Bank town of Jenin in a shooting claimed by Hamas’s armed wing, the Ezzedine al Qassam Brigades.
Later an Al Aqsa man was shot dead during a gunbattle with Israeli troops in the nearby town of Qabatiya. Rafat Assus, 22, was critically wounded and died in hospital.
Around 15,000 people attended the Gaza funerals amid shouts of ‘revenge, Revenge’ and ‘answer in Tel Aviv’, all punctuated by burst of gunfire.
Hundreds of masked militants paraded mortar rounds, Kalashnikovs and grenades in the streets, as the victims’ wives and children sobbed.
Qaraa is the first Hamas member to be killed since a flareup which kicked off last Wednesday following an Islamic Jihad suicide bombing in northern Israel that killed five Israelis.
Until Tuesday’s airstrike, Hamas had remained largely silent.
Fourteen Palestinians and six Israelis have been killed in violence since the Oct 26 suicide bombing.
The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, however, promptly renounced the informal truce, in place since the beginning of the year. “To hell with the truce,” it said, announcing a ‘mobilization’ of its supporters following the airstrike.
Overnight, Gaza militants fired a Qassam rocket and a mortar into Israel, causing no injuries or damage.
Israel would only stop meting out ‘justice’ when the Palestinians took on militants, a senior aide to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told the Haaretz daily on Wednesday.
“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,” Ranaan Gissin said.
Israeli sources said the two men killed on Tuesday were responsible for a string of attacks which killed 20 Israelis, prompting the top-selling Yediot Aharonot daily to laud the strike as ‘one of the more significant assassination operations in recent years’. —AFP
