Gaza/Tel Aviv - Israeli soldiers stationed on the southern
border of the Gaza Strip shot and injured a female Palestinian farmer
early Tuesday, while Palestinian militants overnight launched another
rocket into southern Israel, further threatening a wobbly, 12-day-old
truce.
Palestinian medical officials said the woman was shot in the lower
limbs when she entered her land near the southern Gaza Strip border
with Israel, east of Khan Younis.
The border area shooting is the third such incident reported by
Palestinians, who have said a Palestinian farmer in his 70s was also
shot in the lower limbs Wednesday last week in the same area, near
southern Gaza's border with Israel. A third Palestinian farmer was
shot and wounded by Israeli soldiers stationed on Gaza's north-
western border with Israel on Monday last week.
An Israeli military spokesman said the army was checking the
report of the wounded woman. Of the other two cases, he could only
confirm the shooting of Wednesday last week, but he insisted that the
soldiers had fired only warning shots after they spotted three
Palestinians approaching the border fence. The soldiers did not 'in
any way' aim at the elderly man's body and fired only into the air.
They identified no hit, he told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
Israel has via Egypt informed the radical Islamic Hamas movement
ruling Gaza that it will fire warning shots at any Palestinian
entered a 'no-go' security zone near Gaza's border fence, security
officials confirmed to dpa.
The officials said the decision came after militants had launched
'not one, not two,' but numerous attacks on soldiers guarding the
border.
Many Palestinian farmers, however, have land adjacent to the
border, which they need to cultivate, and enter the area regardless
of the warning.
Hamas has expressed objection to the Israeli decision to declare
the area immediately west of Gaza's security fence a 'no-go' security
strip and the move was expected to create tension.
The Israeli Ha'aretz daily reported Tuesday that Israel wants to
keep the 'no-go' security zones along Gaza's border because it fears
that militants will use the truce to plant explosives on the
Palestinian side of the fence, which would give them an edge if the
ceasefire collapses or when it expires. In the past, militants have
planted bombs aimed at Israeli military vehicles patrolling the area.
According to Ha'aretz, Israel also fears that Hamas might build a
line of fortifications along the fence as a basis for further
attacks, as the Lebanese Hezbollah movement did between Israel's
unilateral withdrawal from a self-proclaimed 'security zone' in
southern Lebanon in May 2000 and the second Lebanon war in the summer
of 2006.
Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak, meanwhile, ordered the
military to again shut Israel's key crossings with Gaza, allowing in
no goods until further notice, in retaliation for an overnight rocket
attack from the Strip.
The rocket launched late Monday caused neither injuries nor
damage, a military spokeswoman in Tel Aviv said, and was the fifth
launched since the truce went into effect at 0300 GMT on June 19.
Israel responded also to the previous launchings by temporarily
shutting the Gaza crossing points. They had just been reopened Sunday
after some four days of complete closure.
No organization claimed responsibility for Monday night's rocket
attack, after Hamas had threatened to take steps against other
militant factions in Gaza violating the truce.
The Iranian-backed Islamic Jihad movement had claimed credit for
all but one of the previous rockets fired since the truce.
It has said it wants Israel to expand the ceasefire to the West
Bank and fired the rockets after Israeli soldiers killed a senior
Islamic Jihad militant and his companion during an arrest raid in the
northern West Bank city of Nablus last week.
The ceasefire in Gaza, brokered by Egypt, took effect after months
of difficult indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas, and of
near-daily rocket attacks from the Strip and Israeli retaliatory
military incursions.
USA
Your Talkback on this Story