Attack by longer-range rocket spurs Israel to toughen its stance
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JERUSALEM: Israeli security officials said that a rocket with a longer range than usual fired by Palestinian militants from Gaza into the coastal city of Ashkelon on Thursday had been made in Iran. It was the first such rocket to land in Israel, and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said that Israel would intensify its response to the firing of such longer-range rockets.
In the Gaza Strip, at least four Palestinians were killed on Sunday by Israeli ground forces during an incursion into Gaza, in and around Bureij refugee camp, Palestinian medical officials said. Palestinians said that three of those killed - a woman and two youths, aged 18 and 16 - were not involved with the militants. The fourth was identified as a gunman.
An Israeli Army spokeswoman said that the forces had fired at armed Palestinians, hitting three. She had no immediate information about civilian deaths. Five Israeli soldiers were wounded, one moderately and the rest lightly, by antitank missiles fired by Palestinians, the spokeswoman said.
Thousands of short-range homemade rockets and mortar shells have been fired by Palestinian militants at Israel in the past few years, but the one that fell in an open field in northern Ashkelon on Thursday traveled more than 16 kilometers, or 10 miles, the farthest landing from Gaza.
There have been a few cases of militants from Gaza firing old 122-mm Katyushas that were probably manufactured in the Eastern bloc and smuggled into Gaza. But the rocket that landed on Thursday in the city of 120,000 people was different, said Micky Rosenfeld, an Israeli police spokesman.
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The 122-mm rocket was "not like something we've seen before" out of Gaza, he said.
The Israeli security officials confirmed that it was Iranian-made, speaking on the condition of anonymity, because of the sensitivity of the issue. An Israeli newspaper, Yediot Aharonot, on Sunday cited unidentified Israeli security officials saying that the rocket had been smuggled to Gaza from Egypt by sea.
In comments at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting, Olmert said of the Thursday attack, "There is no doubt that this constitutes an intensification and escalation in terrorism perpetrated by terrorist organizations in the Gaza Strip." Though Olmert warned of a stepped-up response, he suggested that for now, the army would essentially continue with its current pattern of almost daily ground incursions into Gaza and airstrikes against militants.
The issue of weapons smuggling from Egypt into Gaza has caused tension in Egyptian relations with Israel and the United States.
Congress passed legislation recently to set several conditions for the $100 million of the planned U.S. military aid to Egypt, including steps to improve security along the Egyptian border with Gaza.
Representative Steve Israel, a Democrat from Long Island and a member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations, arrived here Sunday after meeting with the president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, in a Sinai resort to discuss the problem of weapons smuggling through tunnels running under the border with Gaza. Israeli officials say that tens of tons of explosives have been smuggled through the tunnels in the past few months.
Israel said he "saw a tunnel coming up in someone's bedroom closet" on the Egyptian side of the border. He said that the language of the legislation, which he supported, "had the right effect" and that the "Egyptians have focused effectively" on the tunnels issue.
Israel said the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers sent a team to examine the tunnels in November. He also said that he had been told that Egypt asked to dedicate $23 million of its foreign military financing for state-of-the-art tunnel detection equipment. Egyptian officials were not immediately reachable for comment. He added that all his Egyptian interlocutors mentioned that there was also a problem of smuggling off the coast.
Also on Sunday, the committee investigating the performance of the Israeli leadership during the 2006 war in Lebanon announced that it would publish its long-awaited final report on Jan. 30. The report, expected to be critical, is likely to touch off another round of political tumult in Israel, with renewed calls for the resignation of the prime minister and demands for early elections.
An interim report was published last April by the state-appointed commission, headed by a retired judge, Eliyahu Winograd. It dealt with the run-up to, and the first few days of, the conflict with the Lebanese Hezbollah militia. It excoriated Olmert for "severe failures" in conducting the 34-day war.
The wartime army chief of staff, Dan Halutz, and the defense minister, Amir Peretz, have resigned amid harsh domestic criticism.
Separately, Yesh Din, an Israeli advocacy group supporting Palestinian rights, issued a report Sunday describing what it said was a lack of due process in the Israeli military courts operating in the occupied West Bank. The report says that Palestinian defendants were fully acquitted in only 23 of 8,854 cases that reached verdicts in 2006. Most cases concluded in plea bargains without a full trial, the report said.
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