Hamas declares Gaza emergency amid Israeli strikes
GAZA CITY – The Gaza Strip’s Hamas rulers declared a state of emergency for the security forces Saturday in the wake of confrontations with Israel that have killed 18.
The Hamas move came after Israel’s military killed two Palestinians in Gaza on Saturday, raising the toll in the deadliest clashes since a devastating war more than two years ago.
A truce declared by Palestinian armed groups in the enclave unravelled even before it could take hold as militants fired dozens of projectiles into southern Israel and the military retaliated.
“The (Hamas) interior ministry has decreed a state of emergency. All security forces must work 24 hours a day along with the civil defense and medical services to protect and save inhabitants taken as targets by the Zionist occupier,” ministry spokesman Ihab al-Ghussein declared.
The armed confrontation between Israel and Hamas, the worst since 2009, has cost the lives of 18 Palestinians since Thursday in the Gaza Strip. They included Tayssir Abu Sneneh, a head of Hamas’s armed wing the Ezzedin al-Qassam Brigades.
The Israeli army said in a statement that Sneneh was implicated “directly and physically” in the abduction of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit and had recently been told to carry out “a terrorist attack from the Sinai Desert, using rockets, against the Israeli city of Eilat.”
Shalit, 24, who has French nationality, was captured in Israel in June 2006 by three armed Palestinian groups, one coming under Hamas.
The violence continued Saturday with Palestinians firing some 50 salvos of projectiles at Israel, and Israelis responding with air raids.
An Israeli raid in eastern Gaza City on Saturday evening killed a member of the Nasser Brigades, the military wing of the Popular Resistance Committees, and wounded two other Palestinians, a medic said.
Israeli tanks wounded another Palestinian in the strip’s north.
On Saturday morning, an Israeli tank round killed a Palestinian and wounded a second in an eastern neighborhood of Gaza City, medics said without specifying whether the casualties were militants or civilians.
The deaths took to 18 the number of Palestinians killed, including at least six militants and a 10-year-old boy, since an anti-tank round was fired at an Israeli school bus near kibbutz Nahal Oz, close to Gaza, on Thursday.
At least 57 Palestinians were wounded, 12 seriously, medics said.
Militants have fired dozens of mortars and rockets into Israel, which has hit back in its deadliest strikes since the devastating 22-day conflict ended in January 2009.
But a senior Israeli security official said the Islamist group ruling the Gaza Strip had asked for a ceasefire.
“The political branch of Hamas has sent a message asking for an Israeli ceasefire” in exchange for a halt to Palestinian attacks, the official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
He said Israeli operations would continue for as long as Israel felt “its people cannot lead normal lives” because of the threat of Palestinian attack.
He also indicated that Defense Minister Ehud Barak had indefinitely postponed a trip to Washington because of the gravity of the situation.
Thursday’s attack on the school bus critically wounded a teenager and injured the driver.
“The attack on a school bus yesterday crossed the line… Whoever tries to hurt and murder children, his blood will be on his own head,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Friday.
Israel’s retaliatory strikes have made the confrontation the deadliest since the end of Operation Cast Lead, the offensive Israel launched in December 2008 that claimed the lives of some 1,400 Palestinians — more than half civilians — and 13 Israelis, including 10 soldiers.
Palestinian armed groups declared a unilateral truce, but both Hamas and Islamic Jihad claimed mortar and rocket attacks on Israel on Friday as the violence intensified.
An Israeli military spokeswoman said rocket and mortar fire by Gaza militants continued into Saturday morning.
Several industrially manufactured Grad rockets were fired at the Israeli city of Ashkelon but were intercepted by the newly deployed Iron Dome short-range defence system, the spokeswoman added.
The port with a population of some 113,000 was the second city to be protected by an Iron Dome battery after the desert city of Beersheba which has also been targeted by Gaza militants.
The defense system, the first of its kind in the world and still experimental, is not yet able to provide complete protection against rocket fire from Gaza, army commanders have warned.
EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton condemned the rocket fire from Gaza but also urged Israel to show restraint, urging “an immediate cessation of all violence” and prompting an Israeli diplomat’s “dismay” at her “choice of words.”
