Israelis kill two members of Palestinian rocket squad
Israeli missiles slammed into a car in Gaza City today, killing two members of a Palestinian rocket squad in the second deadly air strike since the Islamic militant group Hamas assumed power last week.
The militants had just fired a rocket toward Israel and returned to their car when they were hit, the Israeli military said.
The pair were from the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, a violent offshoot of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah Party. A third member of the rocket squad was seriously wounded.
On Friday, a missile strike killed five Hamas-linked militants and a seven-year-old boy in an attack on a militants’ training camp southern Gaza. Fourteen people were wounded in the strike. Six remained in hospital today.
Abbas, meanwhile, said Hamas has begun to realise after just a week in power that it cannot govern without the world’s recognition, but is still grappling with the international community’s demands that it moderate its positions.
Hamas has sent conflicting messages in recent days. Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas has said that the Islamic militant group will not comply with demands that it recognise Israel, renounce violence and accept existing peace agreements. However, Haniyeh has also said Abbas is free to negotiate with Israel, and others in the group have raised the possibility of accepting a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
“You may notice some confusion in their political positions,” Abbas told the The Guardian in an interview published today. “If Hamas does not change, nobody will deal with them. … They came to understand it. In the beginning, during the elections, they had some illusions that they can deliver, that they can survive without help.”
“But they started realising that thisis not doable,” Abbas was quoted as saying. “But they are only a week in office, so let us wait. It needs time.”
On Friday, the European Union and the US announced they are halting hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority. Haniyeh denounced the decisions as “blackmail”, and said Hamas would not change its positions.
Yet Haniyeh has acknowledged that the government is broke and would have trouble paying the salaries of 140,000 government employees, who with their dependants make up about one third of the Palestinians. Government paycheques for March are more than a week overdue, and the new Palestinian finance minister has said he is still $85m (€70.3m) short, more than half the total needed.
On Friday, Abbas met Haniyeh to try to settle some of the growing differences between him and the Hamas government. Abbas is a moderate who was elected separately last year. The two sides have been wrangling over authority, and earlier in the week, Abbas assumed control over more branches of the security forces.
Abbas, meanwhile, warned Israel that it cannot solve its conflict with the Palestinians by drawing borders unilaterally, without negotiations. Israel can postpone the conflict for a decade, he said. “After 10 years, our sons will feel it (the border) is unfair and they will return back to the struggle,” he said.
Israel’s designated prime minister, Ehud Olmert, has said he would try to resume peace talks with the Palestinians, but has not said whether he would negotiate with Abbas.
The Palestinians fear that Olmert is not serious about reviving negotiations, and that his real plan is to draw Israel’s borders with a Palestinian state unilaterally. Olmert has said he wants final borders in place by 2010.
Olmert, who is in the midst of forming a ruling coalition, has said Israel wants to annex large areas the Palestinians demand for their state, including east Jerusalem and large Jewish settlements in the West Bank – a plan likely to be met by wall-to-wall Palestinian rejection.
“Nobody will accept it. The struggle will continue,” Abbas said.
In other developments, two Palestinians were killed when the tunnel they were crawling through under the Gaza-Egypt border collapsed, Palestinian police said. The tunnel apparently caved in overnight but the bodies were found only after dawn today, the police said.
The two Palestinians are from a family known for drug and food smuggling in the area, the police said.
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