Hamas calls off truce with Israel after 10 die

Hamas supporters attend a rally against Israeli air strikes in Gaza June 9, 2006. (Eliana Aponte/Reuters)

By Nidal al-Mughrabi

June 9,2006

Yahoo News

GAZA (Reuters) -Islamic militant group Hamas called off a 16-month-old truce with Israel on Friday after attacks blamed on Israeli forces killed 10 Palestinians, including three children playing on a beach.

Israel's army, which had been shelling northern Gaza to curb rocket fire by militants, said it was investigating the deaths.

Hamas, sworn to destroying the Jewish state, vowed to revive a campaign marked by suicide bombings that it put on hold well before winning elections that gave it control of the Palestinian government in March.

Renewed violence could bury Western hopes of pressuring Hamas to soften its stand and raise questions over a referendum that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas planned on a statehood proposal implicitly recognizing Israel.

"The Israeli massacres represent a direct opening battle," Hamas's armed wing said in a statement echoed by its political leaders.

"The earthquake in the Zionist cities will resume and the herds of occupiers have no choice but to prepare the coffins or the departing luggage."

There was no immediate comment on Hamas's announcement from Israel or from Abbas, locked in a power struggle with the Islamists.

Palestinian officials said Israeli air strikes and artillery fire killed 10 Palestinians in Gaza, the highest Palestinian toll in a single day since 2004. Seven people, including five from the same family, were killed in what Palestinian officials said was Israeli shellfire from boats on to a crowded beach.

Among the dead were three children, aged 1, 3 and 10. Their sister, who had been swimming, survived. Twenty people were wounded. Covered in blood, children screamed as adults carried the wounded and dead from the sand.

Israel regularly shells parts of the northern Gaza Strip used by militants to fire rockets over the border. The army said it had suspended all shelling and begun an investigation. A commander said he regretted any civilian deaths.

ARMY INVESTIGATING

"We did not fire into a place where there were innocents," Major-General Yoav Galant told reporters. "We are exploring two possibilities, a wrongly aimed artillery shell or an independent incident we were not involved in."

He did not say who else might have been behind the deaths.

In a separate incident, an Israeli airstrike killed three men that the army said it believed had just fired rockets into Israel. Palestinians said the men were civilians.

Militants had stepped up rocket fire from Gaza on Friday following Israel's killing on Thursday of senior militant Abu Samhadana, who had also been appointed by Hamas as a top security commander.

Abbas called the deaths on the beach "a bloody massacre" and declared three days of mourning.

Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, also a Hamas leader and a political opponent of Abbas, called the deaths a "war crime" and urged Jordan and Egypt, both mediators in past Israeli-Palestinian talks, to intervene.

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri confirmed the militant group would renew its attacks.

"I believe that amid the continued bloodshed of our people and the horrific images of massacres, there is no place for silence," Abu Zuhri said.

The bloodshed on Friday added to tensions after Haniyeh made a last-minute appeal to Abbas to abandon a referendum on a statehood proposal that has been rejected by the Islamist group.

Abbas was expected to issue a decree on Saturday that would allow a referendum by July 31, setting a date for a showdown with Hamas.

Haniyeh said it had "no legal and constitutional basis."

The proposed manifesto implicitly recognizes Israel by calling for a Palestinian state on all of the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank, which Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war. Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip last year.

(Additional reporting by Jerusalem and Ramallah bureaus)