Tens of thousands of Palestinians wept and screamed for revenge on Thursday as they buried 18 civilians killed in Gaza by Israeli shelling that Israel’s prime minister blamed on a technical failure.
”Killers in Israel, you will never be able to defeat one Palestinian child,” said Abdul Hakim Awad, an official of President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, saying he was very distressed by the deaths of innocent people, said the carnage was the result of a ”technical failure” by Israeli artillery.
An army spokesperson said a targeting system fault was to blame and that artillery shelling in Gaza, suspended since the incident, would not be renewed until ”all technical examinations are completed”. She did not say how long the checks would take.
Groups of militants, some masked and firing weapons in the air, flanked the procession as it snaked through the streets of Beit Hanoun, where Wednesday’s attack took place, before the dead were laid to rest in a new cemetery.
The bodies, including seven children and four women, were each wrapped in a yellow flag, the symbol of the Fatah movement, and held aloft on stretchers among a vast crowd of tearful and angry mourners.
Cries of ”Allahu Akbar” filled the air as the bodies were placed in their graves. The youngest was an 18-month-old girl laid in the ground by her weeping father.
”We say, an eye for an eye and a soul for a soul. There will be no security in Ashkelon, no security in Tel Aviv or Haifa, until our people in Beit Hanoun are made secure,” Awad said.
Speaking at a business conference in Tel Aviv, Olmert reiterated his readiness to hold a summit with Abbas, a moderate leader locked in a power struggle with the governing Islamist militant group Hamas.
”He will be surprised, when he will sit with me at how far we are prepared to go. I can offer him a lot,” said Olmert.
The Israeli leader did not elaborate. Abbas has been seeking a substantial release of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel in return for an Israeli soldier seized by militants in June.
Responding to Olmert’s comments, Nabil Abu Rdainah, a spokesperson for Abbas, said the Palestinian president wanted a summit to be more than a photo opportunity.
”There should be preparations for such a meeting. Once these preparations are concluded, we will go to this meeting,” Abu Rdainah said, offering no time frame.
Makeshift missiles
Palestinian leaders have called Wednesday’s attack a massacre. Some Hamas lawmakers have threatened that its armed wing would resume suicide attacks against Israel.
The Israeli army said it was targeting rocket launchers using the Beit Hanoun area as a staging ground to fire makeshift missiles at the Jewish state.
After the inquiry into the incident, Israeli Defence Minister Amir Peretz said in a statement any future artillery fire in the Gaza Strip would be conducted only on the order of Israel’s southern command chief, who is a major-general, or someone more senior.
Olmert said the artillery unit had targeted an orange grove, ”where we had spotted shooting seconds before” but a technical fault sent the shells in the wrong direction.
The Beit Hanoun killings rallied Palestinians after months of factional infighting between Fatah and Hamas, which is dedicated to Israel’s destruction.
But Damascus-based Khaled Meshaal, the leader of Hamas, urged retaliation.
Hamas declared a truce in March 2005 that expired at the year-end. It has not carried out suicide bombings in Israel since 2004.
While the European Union said it was ”appalled” by the Gaza shelling, an initial response by the United States stopped short of reprimanding Israel. Olmert is due to meet President George Bush in Washington on Monday.
The Beit Hanoun killings brought together the moderate Abbas and Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas, who have been at odds over a proposal to create a unity government that might help lift a Western aid blockade.
Abbas and Meshaal later spoke by telephone, in a further sign of greater cooperation between the rival movements, suggesting progress could soon be made on a unity government. – Reuters