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Israel to Keep Hitting Gaza Militants NewsMax.com Wires JERUSALEM -- Israel resolved Wednesday to keep striking Gaza Strip rocket squads firing at Israeli border towns and insisted it wasn't negotiating a truce with radical groups. The supreme leader of the Hamas militant group, which has been behind the latest surge in rocket attacks, vowed that attacks on Israel would continue, too. Hamas, the senior partner in the Palestinian government, has launched most of the 270 rockets that the Israeli military says has been fired since violence flared in mid-May. The projectiles are crude, but they have killed two Israeli civilians, and sent thousands fleeing the frequently targeted town of Sderot. Israel has hit back, mostly with airstrikes that have killed more than 50 Palestinians, most of them militants. Two members of a Hamas rocket squad were killed in an Israeli air attack on northern Gaza before dawn Wednesday. Later in the day, Israel's Security Cabinet met to assess the situation and concluded that Israel's two-week-old military campaign has been effective in "relatively" reducing rocket fire, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office said. In mid-May, at the height of the latest round of rocket barrages, about 38 were fired in a single day, compared with two Tuesday, the military said. "There are results to the Israeli army's actions, and therefore we will continue our operations," Security Cabinet member Isaac Herzog told Army Radio after the meeting. Story Continues Below
"Israel is not conducting any negotiations for a cease-fire with terror organizations," Olmert's office added. Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal warned from his base in Damascus, Syria, that attacks on Israel would continue despite the Israeli reprisals. "Under occupation people don't ask whether their means are effective in hurting the enemy," Khaled Mashaal told London's Guardian newspaper in an interview published Wednesday. "The Palestinians have only modest means, so they defend themselves however they can." In addition to striking back from the air, Israel has conducted limited ground operations inside Gaza, and arrested dozens of Hamas political leaders in the West Bank. The latest cycle of violence is expected to top the agenda of Olmert's meeting next week with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, a moderate who favors peacemaking, but has been ineffective in stopping the militant attacks. Abbas has proposed a truce agreement that would commit Gaza militants to halt their rocket fire for a month to permit negotiations on a more comprehensive cease-fire including the West Bank, where Israel conducts frequent arrest raids against militants. He has also urged militants to take the first step in forging a new cease-fire, saying the alternative would be the collapse of the Palestinian national unity government. Militants have said a truce was out of the question as long as Israel kept up its attacks and refused to extend any Gaza cease-fire to the West Bank. Israel has so far rejected the notion of applying the truce to West Bank, especially in light of the latest round of attacks from Gaza. Abbas and Olmert had promised Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in March to meet every two weeks to try to get long-stalled peacemaking back on track, but have only met once, on April 15. In Berlin on Tuesday, Rice rejected the notion that her time might be better spent trying to broker a cease-fire between Israel and the Palestinians than exploring ideas about a final peace settlement between the two sides. "I don't frankly see my role as negotiating a cease-fire between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority," she said. "There ought to be a cessation of violence because there ought to be a cessation of violence. The Palestinians themselves are pursuing that course and some of the Arab states have been helping them." A Hamas delegation was to meet in Cairo with Egyptian officials this week to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian violence, as well as deadly infighting between Palestinian factions earlier this month that ceased after the Israeli airstrikes began.
© 2007 Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Editor's note: Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
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