Hamas ended an 18-month ceasefire on Saturday, firing 11 rockets at Israel just hours before Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas was due to announce a controversial referendum.
A statement by the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s armed wing, said the attacks were in response to the killing of 10 Palestinians, including three young children, by Israeli artillery fire on Friday.
Hamas has largely kept a ceasefire since February 2005, but after Friday’s deaths it warned attacks would resume. In a statement on Saturday, the militants vowed to “continue the resistance with these earth-shaking actions.”
The Israeli army confirmed that 11 rockets had been fired at Israel, but reported no damage or casualties.
One rocket fell on the Jabalya refugee camp in northern Gaza, injuring four Palestinians, medical sources said.
Facing international condemnation for Friday’s killings, Israel scrambled on Saturday to contain the diplomatic fallout.
After the United States urged Israel to “consider the consequences of its actions”, the army said it had suspended artillery bombardment of northern Gaza while an investigation into the incident continued.
Israeli Defence Minister Amir Peretz contacted Abbas on Saturday to express regret for the deaths.
Peretz “regretted the death of innocent victims and assured Abbas that Israel will make all possible efforts to prevent the repeat of such an incident in the future”, spokesperson Ilan Ostfeld told Agence France-Presse.
An army spokesperson said one child wounded in Friday’s bombardment had been allowed out of Gaza and taken to an Israeli hospital.
In the West Bank town of Ramallah all businesses closed in mourning on Saturday.
Elsewhere, Hamas gunmen killed a Palestinian security officer from a force loyal to Abbas’s Fatah movement after trying to kidnap him, security officials said.
The ruling Islamist Hamas movement’s decision to renew attacks against Israel came as Abbas was set to make a formal announcement on a statehood referendum, which the Islamists fiercely oppose.
“The idea of a referendum carries serious dangers for the unity of the Palestinian people, and I fear that it may provoke an historic division that will take decades to overcome,” prime minister Ismail Haniya said in a letter to Abbas, a copy of which was obtained by AFP.
Sources at the president’s office said on Friday that Abbas had already signed a decree for the first-ever Palestinian referendum to be held in the West Bank and Gaza Strip on July 31.
Abbas will make a statement on the referendum from his West Bank headquarters at 4pm local time on Saturday, his office said.
The document being put to referendum calls for a national-unity government, an end to attacks in Israel and the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel on land conquered by Israel in 1967.
If approved by voters, the blueprint would undercut Hamas’s platform of refusing to recognise Israel or disavow violence, even within Israeli borders, and bounce it into a coalition with Fatah.
Abbas, in contrast, has long championed a negotiated settlement to the conflict with Israel and criticised suicide bombings.
He decided on the referendum, a plan he unveiled two weeks ago, after talks on resolving disputes between Hamas and his own Fatah movement failed to make progress.
The two sides have been at loggerheads over a range of issues, in particular control of the security services which remain under Abbas’s remit — despite Hamas’s crushing parliamentary election victory over Fatah in January.
Hamas subsequently deployed its own rival paramilitary force in Gaza City, sparking deadly clashes with members of the official security services, which have killed 17 people since May.
The Abbas referendum blueprint, drawn up by prisoners from all Palestinian factions held in Israeli jails, is designed to draw a line under the bloody rivalry.
The United States, European Union and Russia, who along with the United Nations are part of the Middle East diplomatic quartet, all support the measure.
Israel has called it an internal Palestinian matter. — AFP