Palestinian gunmen shot and killed an Israeli motorist early on Thursday as Israel’s foreign minister warned that civilians would likely ”pay dearly” for the airstrike that killed a top Palestinian militant and 14 other people.
International criticism of the raid continued with the UN Security Council meeting to consider condemning the strike, and a small group of Americans burning US and Israeli flags at a demonstration in the Rafah refugee camp in southern Gaza.
As it braced for possible Palestinian retaliation, Israel said it was pressing ahead with a planned transfer of millions of dollars in frozen funds to the Palestinians and with other goodwill gestures in the wake of the Gaza strike.
In violence on Thursday, a rabbi was killed and another person seriously injured after gunmen opened fire on their car near the Jewish settlement of Alei Zahav, south of the Palestinian town of Qalqilya in the West Bank, rescue officials and the military said.
The gunfire, coming from the nearby Palestinian village of Burkin, continued after rescue crews arrived at the scene and only stopped after Israeli tanks arrived and returned fire, medic Avner
Mullah told Israel Radio.
Military officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said tracks from the scene led to Burkin and that troops were questioning residents.
Separately in Qalqilya, the army demolished a house belonging to a member of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement and arrested two occupants, residents said. They said Fatah’s general secretary in Qalqilya, Ahmed Hazaa, was also arrested. The army
said it was checking the report.
The arrests and shooting came the militant group Hamas and others groups promised to avenge the bombing early on Tuesday in Gaza City that killed Hamas military leader Salah Shehadeh and 14 others, nine of them children.
”I know that there is very serious escalation,” Foreign Minister Shimon Peres told Israel Army Radio. ”I fear that innocent people will pay for it dearly.”
A day earlier, he said the strike was a ”mistake” and ”I cannot explain mistakes.”
He admitted knowing that the Palestinian Authority had been conducting negotiations with various militant groups, including Hamas, aimed at forging a cease-fire. But he said that not all factions were on board and that it wasn’t worth talking about since
the agreement hadn’t been finalised.
Critics, including the Americans, Europeans, Arab countries and Palestinians, have dismissed Israel’s explanation that didn’t mean to kill so many people, questioning why such a heavy bomb was used in a residential neighborhood against a single target.
The Israeli military and its Shin Bet security service were investigating what went wrong. Military commanders insisted they did not know civilians would be hurt.
More than 100 people were injured in the strike, most of them in adjoining structures damaged by the bomb, reported by Israeli media to have weighed a ton.
A respected Israeli military expert, Reuven Pedatzur, said the debate over whether Israel knew civilians were with Shehadeh was largely irrelevant because it had decided to use such a lethal bomb.
”The decision to use a one-ton bomb was an immoral decision,” he told Israel Radio. ”It makes no difference if there were people in the room with him or not when it is clear that the houses round
about will be destroyed.”
Trying to counter the wave of criticism, Israel on Wednesday sent Peres, its best-known peace advocate, on a tour of the offices of foreign news media in Jerusalem, where he said, over and over, that the bombing was a mistake.
Peres said that as goodwill gestures, Israel would release some of the funds it has been keeping from the Palestinian Authority and would allow 4 000 Palestinian workers to enter Israel. Also, he
said, curfews in West Bank cities and towns would be lifted for longer periods.
However, the gestures did not mollify the Palestinians, who called the Tuesday bombing a massacre and have been demanding much wider Israeli measures to ease restrictions in the West Bank.
Before the current fighting erupted in September 2000, about 125 000 Palestinians worked in Israel, and Israel regularly transferred millions of dollars of customs and taxes to the Palestinian Authority under terms of interim peace accords.
After suicide bombings in Jerusalem a month ago, Israeli forces took control of seven of the eight main West Bank cities and towns, imposing curfews that confine people to their homes most of the
time.
Palestinians demand that Israel pull out of their areas, remove roadblocks and other restrictions and free all their funds. The Israelis say the restrictions are necessary to keep bombers and
other attackers out of Israel, and they have refused to turn over the money, charging that the funds would finance terror attacks.
Peres said he called the Palestinian finance minister on Wednesday to tell him that about $45-million was being transferred, about 10% of the total amount Israel has withheld in tax revenues, and that Israel had forgiven about $31-million in Palestinian
debt to Israeli utilities.
Peres said on Thursday Israel had decided to turn over the money even though American supervision it had previously demanded wasn’t in place to ensure the cash wasn’t used to finance attacks. He denied Israel had released the money as a concession following the
Gaza strike, saying the Palestinian finance minister had set up his own mechanism to make sure the money was accounted for.
Peres said he hoped to press on with talks with Palestinians on security and economic issues – including a Palestinian plan to restart security cooperation – but the Palestinians said no
decision had been made about whether or when such meetings might resume. – Sapa-AP