Gaza, March 19: Palestinian militants launched their first deadly rocket attack on Israel in over a year, killing a Thai worker on Thursday in a strike that challenged Gaza’s Hamas rulers and prompted Israel to threaten a powerful response.
The rocket tore into a plastic-covered hothouse in the Israeli community of Netiv Ha’asara an hour after the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, paid a rare visit by a top diplomat to the Israeli-blockaded Gaza Strip.
She condemned the attack, as did United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, scheduled to visit the Gaza Strip, Israel and the West Bank on Saturday and Sunday.
A previously unknown group, Ansar al-Sunna, believed to share the hardline ideology of al Qaeda, claimed responsibility for the strike, the first from the Gaza Strip to kill anyone in Israel since it ended its war in the enclave in January 2009.
“This is a crossing of the red line, which Israel cannot accept. The Israeli response will be appropriate. It will be strong,” Vice Prime Minister Silvan Shalom told reporters.
Farmers at Netiv Ha’asara said an alarm, warning of an incoming rocket, sounded about 20 seconds before it hit. It was unclear why the Thai worker had not reached a nearby shelter in time.
PEACE DIPLOMACY
The attack was launched a day before the international Quartet of Middle East mediators was to meet in Moscow to discuss ways to revive peace talks frozen since December 2008.
But the incident could have more of an impact on internal Palestinian politics than on the Middle East peace process, which Hamas has refused to join and which is at an impasse over Israeli settlement policy on land Palestinians want for a state.
Hamas Islamists, who seized the Gaza Strip in 2007, had been urging other militant groups not to strike Israel, voicing concern about possible Israeli retaliation.
Those so-called Salafi groups, whose agenda of “jihad”, or holy war, against the West is contrary to Hamas’s nationalist goals, have been challenging Hamas with a series of bombings in recent months against its officials and facilities.
Israeli Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai, however, said Israel held Hamas responsible for any cross-border attacks because the group controlled the Gaza Strip.
“Israel is not interested in a military confrontation but will not allow its citizens to be attacked,” Vilnai said.
Similar strikes since the Gaza war have been met by air raids against militants or suspected weapons-making facilities.
“The Jihadist mission came in response to the Zionist assaults against the Ibrahimi and al-Aqsa mosques and the continued Zionist aggression against our people in Jerusalem,” Ansar al-Sunna said in a statement.
It appeared to be referring to Israel’s national heritage plan to renovate holy sites, including the West Bank town of Hebron’s Tomb of the Patriarchs that is revered by Muslims and Jews, and the rededication this week of an 18th-century synagogue in Jerusalem, some 400 metres (yards) from al-Aqsa.
In a statement on the rocket firing, Hamas steered clear of comments that could be seen by Palestinians in the Israeli-blockaded Gaza Strip as disapproving of a strike against its enemy, even an attack that strained an informal truce.
“The government of the Zionist enemy, which has launched a war against the Palestinian people and against holy sites and al-Aqsa mosque, bears the responsibility for all the escalation,” Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said.
Palestinian militants in Gaza have carried out sporadic rocket and mortar bomb attacks on Israel since the end of the three-week Gaza war, usually without causing any casualties.
More than 1,400 Palestinians, including hundreds of civilians, were killed in that offensive, launched with the declared aim of curbing rocket attacks. Thirteen Israelis, among them three civilians, were killed.
Separately on Thursday, the U.S. Treasury imposed sanctions against two firms in Gaza for their ties to Hamas.
It said the bank provided services to members of Hamas’ military wing, and the television station aired programs “designed to recruit children to become Hamas armed fighters and suicide bombers upon reaching adulthood”.
—–Agencies