Enlarge imageBy Nidal al-Mughrabi
GAZA (Reuters) - Israel killed seven Hamas gunmen in air strikes on Friday in retaliation for a deadly Palestinian rocket attack, resuming its assassination policy against militants as a 5-month-old truce appeared to be unravelling.
The militant Islamic group Hamas said the back-to-back missile strikes on cars in the West Bank and Gaza Strip would "open the doors of hell" on Israel, and said it was reconsidering its commitment to the ceasefire.
The surge of violence, one of the worst since Israel and the Palestinian Authority declared an end to hostilities in February, raised the possibility of disruptions to Israel’s planned pullout of settlers from occupied Gaza next month.
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The Israeli strikes followed the killing of a young Israeli woman in a rocket barrage on Thursday that sparked the fiercest internal fighting in years between militants and Palestinian police, who confronted them trying to stop further salvoes.
Two Palestinian bystanders were killed in the gunbattles, which raised Palestinian fears of civil war.
The Palestinian Authority declared a state of emergency in Gaza. President Mahmoud Abbas, struggling to salvage the truce and keep control in the face of a growing Hamas challenge, ordered police to act amid Israeli threats of reprisals.
Israel launched a series of air raids against Hamas targets in Gaza before dawn on Friday, causing no casualties.
Hours later, three Hamas militants were killed in an Israeli helicopter strike near the major Jewish settlement of Ariel in the occupied West Bank, Palestinian witnesses said.
Within minutes, Israeli helicopters over Gaza City launched a missile into a car, tearing it apart and killing four Hamas militants inside, hospital officials said.
Israel had reaffirmed its intention to resume its assassination policy against militant commanders following an Islamic Jihad suicide attack that killed five Israelis in the coastal town of Netanya on Tuesday.
GAZA PULLOUT PLAN
The surge of bloodshed could complicate Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to withdraw all Jewish settlers from Gaza starting month, a move international mediators see as a possible springboard to renewed peace talks.
Hamas, sworn to Israel’s destruction, wants to give the impression the Israelis are being chased out. Israel has vowed to crush any effort to disrupt evacuation of Gaza’s 8,500 settlers, who live cloistered from 1.3 million Palestinians.
"The calm is blowing away in the wind, and the Zionist enemy is responsible for that," Hamas spokesman Mushir Al-Masri said.
Palestinian officials and Hamas leaders exchanged recriminations over the internal strife but also began talks to calm the situation.
The police action suggested a possible shift in policy by Abbas, who until now had been reluctant to crack down on militants despite demands from Israel and the United States.
Hamas militants said Thursday’s deadly rocket attack on an Israeli collective farm avenged the killing of a militant leader in an Israeli army raid into the West Bank city of Nablus, part of an offensive after Tuesday’s suicide bombing in Israel.
Hamas militants fought Palestinian police who raided rocket launching sites to stop further attacks. Militants fired machine guns, hurled grenades and torched four police vehicles.
Fighting was concentrated mostly in Gaza’s Zeitoun district, a Hamas stronghold, pitting Palestinian security forces in armoured vehicles against militants firing anti-tank weapons.
Hospital sources said the two dead were unarmed teenagers.
Before the gunbattles subsided, 26 people were wounded, six of them members of security forces and the rest civilians, mostly caught in the crossfire, medics said.
In defiance, Hamas fired several more rockets into Israel and Gaza settlements, causing damage but no casualties.
The fighting was the worst among Palestinians since the mid-1990s when police killed more than a dozen protesters in clashes with stone-throwers outside a Hamas-stronghold mosque.
