Israel and Hamas violence spikes on Gaza border
GAZA (Reuters) - A rocket launched from the Hamas-run GazaStrip killed a man in Israel on Wednesday, the first suchfatality in nine months, after Israeli forces killed eightPalestinians, most of them militants, in the territory.
The rocket attack, claimed by Hamas, seemed certain toincrease public pressure on Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to ordertougher military action in the Gaza Strip, including a possiblewidescale ground operation.
Mounting violence could complicate peace talks betweenIsrael and President Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian Authority,negotiations which the United States hope can lead to astatehood deal this year.
"Israel will take the necessary steps to bring these lethalrocket attacks to an end. Those attacking us will be confrontedby an Israel that is compelled to defend itself, and that ishow we shall proceed," said David Baker, a governmentspokesman.
Earlier in the day, five militants, senior members ofHamas, were killed when the van in which they were travellingwas attacked from the air near the southern Gaza town of KhanYounis, medical officials said.
Local residents who knew the men said some of them hadundergone training in Syria or Iran and returned home afterHamas breached the Gaza Strip's border with Egypt last month indefiance of an Israeli blockade of the territory.
Abu Ubaida, spokesman of Hamas's Izz el-Deen al-QassamBrigades, denied they had travelled outside the Gaza Strip,whose border with Egypt has been resealed.
ROCKET SALVOES
Hamas, which seized the Gaza Strip in June, struck back byfiring more than 30 rockets at southern Israel, and two men,who relatives said were civilians, were killed in an Israeliair strike on a launching site in the northern Gaza Strip.
"The (rocket) bombardment came in response to the Zionistmassacre committed this morning in Khan Younis which led to themartyrdom of five of our best fighters," a Hamas statementsaid.
A militant from the Islamic Jihad group was killed in aseparate air attack east of Bureij refugee camp in the centralGaza Strip, medical workers said.
Hamas says attacks from the Gaza Strip, including rocketsfired by its own militants and others, are a response toIsraeli military operations in the territory and the occupiedWest Bank and would end if Israel stopped all such activity andlifted its blockade.
No one had been killed in Israel by a Palestinian rocketstrike since May 2007. Such attacks are launched almost dailyfrom the Gaza Strip, which Israeli soldiers and settlers quitin 2005.
In the West Bank city of Nablus, Israeli undercover forceskilled one militant and wounded and detained four others, aPalestinian official said.
The men had been confined to a Palestinian securityheadquarters as part of an Israeli amnesty for militantsaffiliated with President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah faction, buthad left the compound, a Palestinian official said.
(Additional reporting by Atef Sa'ad and Labib Nasir inNablus and Ari Rabinovitch and Avida Landau in Jerusalem,Writing by Jeffrey Heller in Jerusalem; Editing by Keith Weir)