Israeli warplanes hit Hamas-run Gaza on Thursday after militants rattled the Jewish state with rocket fire, ending a five-day lull and threatening efforts to push forward Middle East peace talks. The violence flared within hours of an Israeli operation on Wednesday in the West Bank town of Bethlehem, where undercover special forces killed four Palestinian militants, including two senior commanders.Militants in the Hamas-run territory fired a dozen rockets into the Jewish state during the night, Israeli warplanes struck targets in northern Gaza early during the day and gunmen fired another dozen rockets afterward, according to the army and the militant groups. There were no casualties, but the renewed tit-for-tat attacks put at risk international efforts to broker a more permanent deal to end the violence and the isolation around the impoverished territory. They also come a day before the Israelis and Palestinians are to meet with a US general to resume peace talks that Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas suspended amid a week of strikes in Gaza that killed more than 130 Palestinians, including children and other civilians.
Addressing the summit of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference in Dakar on Thursday, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon condemned Israel's "inappropriate and disproportionate use of force" and called on the Jewish state to stop strikes that end up killing civilians.
Senegal's President Abdoulaye Wade, head of the OIC for the next year, said he would make efforts to end the Middle East conflict his number one priority. He also urged a ceasefire but called on Israel to end "all of its illegal activities in the occupied territories ... the blind repression inflicted on the Palestinian people."
| Glad to see he's taking an even-handed approach to it. I'm sure he'll be very successful. |
But Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak vowed to keep hitting militants. "Yesterday in Bethlehem we proved again that Israel will pursue and hit all assassins with blood on their hands. No matter how much time has passed, Israel will be waiting for them," he said.
And the Jewish state said it held Hamas, which violently seized control of Gaza in June, responsible for the rocket fire, even though the radical Islamic Jihad group claimed the salvoes. "Hamas controls the Gaza Strip and they are accountable for every active aggression against Israel," said government spokesman Mark Regev. "We will not allow Hamas to sub-contract out terrorism."
Both Hamas and Islamic Jihad, a radical group that has claimed most of the rocket fire and suicide attacks against Israel over the past several years, vowed revenge after the Bethlehem deaths.
Israel, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad had been observing a tacit truce in and around the Gaza Strip since early Saturday as Egypt seeks to work out a more permanent deal. Egypt has been holding talks aimed at ending Israeli strikes on Gaza, rocket fire into Israel and a lifting of a crippling regime of Israeli and international sanctions on the coastal strip, one of the world's most densely-populated places where most people depend on aid.