Israeli minister issues death threat to Hamas leaders

Monday May 21 2007
The Guardian

All Hamas leaders should be killed to end rocket attacks from Gaza, a senior Israeli cabinet official said today, as Israeli planes carried out new air strikes in the territory.

“I don’t distinguish between those who carry out the (rocket) attacks and those who give the orders. I say we have to put them all in the crosshairs,” said Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, the national infrastructure minister, on Israel Radio.

The comments from Mr Ben-Eliezer, a foreign policy hawk, came on a day that at least four members of Islamic Jihad, were killed in their car near the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahiya. The militant group said they were on their way to launch rockets.

One man was killed in an earlier attack on what Israel called a rocket manufacturing facility but what Palestinians said was a stonemason’s shop. The air strikes knocked out electricity for about 50,000 people.

Israel targeted Hamas in the West Bank as well, raiding and shutting down four television stations linked with Hamas in the city of Nablus, a militant stronghold.

Yesterday, Israeli jets struck the home of a Hamas politician, Khalil al-Hayya. He was not there but hospital officials said eight people were killed in the deadliest attack since Israel started retaliating to rocket salvos from Gaza last week.

The Israeli army spokeswoman Captain Noa Meir said the strike was not aimed at Mr Haya, but at a group of five armed Hamas men, including a senior militant, near the home.

“They, and only they, were the target, and they were hit,” Ms Meir said, adding that any civilian casualties “were the result of the terrorists’ use of civilians as human shields”.

Nabil Abu Rdainah, a top aide to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, condemned Israel for the attack.

“This escalation will lead the Middle East to more violence and instability,” he said.

Hamas and Mr Abbas’s Fatah faction are partners in a two-month-old unity government that is on the verge of breaking point because of recent infighting that has left 50 Palestinians dead.

As Israel increased the military pressure on Hamas, the internal security minister, Avi Dichter, said Hamas’s leader-in-exile, Khaled Meshaal, whom Israel tried to assassinate in Jordan in 1997, would not be “immune” from Israeli attack.

Mr Dichter told Israel Radio that the Palestinian prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, a Hamas leader who lives in Gaza, could be targeted should he become involved in ordering the rocket fire.

Hamas, which last carried out a suicide bombing in Israel in 2004, has threatened to respond with “an earthquake” to the air strikes.

In stepping up military action in response to continued rocket attacks, the Israeli cabinet has stopped short of authorising an all-out offensive on Gaza, which Israel left nearly two years ago.

Mr Ben-Eliezer said a large-scale ground operation in Gaza, where militants are dug in and deployed across residential areas, risked plunging Israel into a “quagmire”.

Israeli military action and an Egyptian-mediated ceasefire seem to have largely stopped more than a week of intensive fighting between Hamas and Fatah.

Despite the air strikes, Gaza militants fired four more rockets at Israel, the army said. There were no casualties.

The EU foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, is heading to the Middle East today to call for a halt to the latest upsurge in violence.

“Solana will urge all parties in the region to restore and maintain calm,” a statement from his office said.

During his four-day trip, he is scheduled to visit Israel, the Palestinian territories, Egypt and Lebanon, where heavy fighting between militias and government forces broke out at the weekend.

Mr Solana is due to meet Mr Abbas; the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert; the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak; the Lebanese prime minister, Fouad Siniora; and the Arab League secretary general, Amr Moussa.

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