NABLUS, July 3: Hopes of peace were dealt a blow on Thursday when a militant Palestinian group threatened to end its freeze on anti-Israeli attacks after one of its members was shot dead and a Jewish settlement was targeted by a rocket attack.

“We warn the Zionist enemy and tell it that we will not remain silent in the face of cowardly operations against our people,” Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed offshoot of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s Fatah group, said in a statement.

“If the enemy carries on with its criminal operations, its assassinations and arrests of our resistance fighters, our response will be very tough,” the group said.

The statement was less strident than threats earlier in the day by militants at the funeral of Mahmud Shawa, 31, who was shot dead in the West Bank on Wednesday night as he resisted arrest by Israeli troops.

As 5,000 people gathered in the streets of the northern town of Qalqilya to pay their last respects, masked and gun-toting militants promised quick revenge and said they were no longer bound by the truce.

The group issued a statement on Monday saying it would respect a truce announced by other militant groups and Fatah a day earlier. Among other things, the ceasefire is conditioned on Israel ending its targeted killing of militants.

The peace process was also undermined by the anti-Israeli rocket attack in the Gaza Strip, which prompted a formal protest by Israel to Palestinian authorities.

The Israelis closed the main north-south Gaza highway for several hours in the morning, after three rockets were fired at the settlement of Kfar Darom, lightly injuring three Israelis.

That attack also drew the condemnation of Palestinian prime minister Mahmoud Abbas, who described it and the killing of a Bulgarian construction worker in the West Bank on Monday as “acts of sabotage which we reject”.

Three Palestinians were also wounded when Israeli troops posted near the road opened fire on cars piling up at a checkpoint, Palestinian security sources and witnesses added.

Soldiers had dragged concrete blocks onto the road at the Abu Gholi and Al-Matahen checkpoints, in the central and southern Gaza Strip, trapping cars between the two, witnesses said.

The violence served to underline the scale of the problems facing the US-backed roadmap, which had gained momentum in recent days.

Israel formally handed over control of the West Bank town of Bethlehem on Wednesday following a similar withdrawal from part of northern Gaza three days earlier.—AFP