Three Israeli soldiers and 17 Palestinians, one a cameraman for an international news agency, were killed on Wednesday as troops backed by helicopters stormed into the Gaza Strip. Fadel Shana (23), a Reuters cameraman, was critically wounded when a missile hit his vehicle in the central Gaza Strip.
Israeli tanks and bulldozers crossed into the Gaza Strip on Friday after the Jewish state warned it would retaliate against Hamas for a deadly explosion of violence earlier this week. Ten tanks and two armoured bulldozers entered 1km into Gaza, west of the Bureij refugee camp, drawing heavy fire from militants.
Hamas set out its conditions on Wednesday for a ceasefire with Israel, calling for an end to all acts of Israeli ”aggression” in the Gaza Strip and West Bank and the reopening of Gaza border crossings. Hamas is demanding a say in the future functioning of the crossings, a condition rejected by Israel.
The Islamist Hamas movement on Friday claimed responsibility for a gun attack that killed eight Jewish teenagers at a Jerusalem religious school on Thursday night. ”Hamas is responsible for the attack. The Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades will officially claim the attack at the right moment,” a senior Hamas official in Gaza said on condition of anonymity.
No image available
/ 25 February 2008
Palestinians protesting against an Israeli-led blockade formed a human chain on Monday along roads in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip and Israel threatened to use force if they tried to surge into its territory. Hundreds of women and children turned out for the start of what organisers said they hoped would be a peaceful protest.
No image available
/ 7 February 2008
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas offered to help negotiate a ceasefire as Israel pounded Gaza on Thursday, killing seven people days after a suicide bombing claimed by Hamas rulers. Hamas promptly rejected the offer, with spokesperson Fawzi Barhum branding it a ”blackmail attempt against the Palestinian people”.
No image available
/ 21 January 2008
Gaza endured a fourth day of hardship on Monday as Israel vowed to maintain a punishing blockade in response to rocket fire from the Hamas-run territory, despite increasing international concern over a developing humanitarian crisis. The European Union slammed what it termed the ”collective punishment” of impoverished Gaza’s 1,5-million residents.
No image available
/ 21 December 2007
Mustafa Hillu writhes underneath blankets, the pain pulsing outward from the cancer in his right leg, and he cries out for someone to persuade Israel to let him in for treatment. If the 36-year-old father of five is not granted entry soon doctors will have to amputate his leg at the groin to prevent the cancer in his femur from spreading, according to his family and an Israeli rights group.
No image available
/ 26 October 2007
Israeli troops killed six Palestinian gunmen on Friday in some of the heaviest fighting for weeks in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian medical and militant sources said. Two Israeli troops were wounded, the army said, as three separate raids were mounted into the territory, backed by air strikes. Seven Palestinian militants and three civilians were wounded, hospital staff said.
No image available
/ 19 September 2007
Masked gunmen crouch behind piles of sand, fingers on the triggers of their rifles, while others rig explosives along the streets of Gaza. The Hamas-run Gaza Strip is bracing for a major incursion by Israeli forces after the Jewish state labelled the territory an ”enemy entity” on Wednesday, a move the Islamist group described as a declaration of war.
No image available
/ 7 September 2007
Hamas security officers beat protesters, hurled stun grenades and fired in the air to disperse open-air prayers the rival Fatah faction held in the Gaza Strip on Friday in defiance of the territory’s Islamist rulers. Palestinian medical officials said at least 20 people, some with gunshot wounds, were taken to hospital for treatment.
Israeli forces killed at least 11 Palestinians, most of them gunmen, on Wednesday in their biggest raid in the Gaza Strip since Hamas Islamists took over the territory two weeks ago, medical workers and residents said. The operation in Gaza City and the southern town of Khan Younis appeared to signal that Israel intended to keep strong military pressure on Hamas.
The Palestinian extremists claiming to hold BBC journalist Alan Johnston on Tuesday issued a chilling threat to slaughter him ”like a lamb” unless Britain and Jordan release Muslim prisoners. The grotesque threat came just two days after the British journalist appeared in a grim new video.
An Israeli soldier captured a year ago by militants from Gaza asked for medical treatment and urged Israel to release Palestinian prisoners, in an audio tape posted on the internet on Monday. Except for a handwritten letter to his parents in September, there had been no sign of life from Gilad Shalit since he was spirited into the Gaza Strip on June 25 2006.
Kidnapped BBC journalist Alan Johnston has appeared in a frightening new video, saying he is wearing a bomb belt that his Gaza captors will detonate if there is any attempt to rescue him. ”As you can see I’ve been dressed in what is an explosive belt …,” says Johnston, wearing a number of packages strapped around his chest.
A senior Hamas leader in Gaza said this week that the movement wants to hold talks with the rival Fatah faction to heal the widening divisions between the Palestinian territories. ”We think that negotiations with Fatah are the only way out,” said Sami Abu Zuhri, a spokesperson and prominent figure in the Hamas movement.
Israel on Wednesday launched its first major attacks in the Gaza Strip since Hamas took over the territory, killing at least four Palestinian fighters. Israel carried out air strikes against rocket launch sites in northern Gaza after militants fired at least one makeshift rocket into southern Israel. Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for firing the rocket.
Israeli tanks crossed into the Gaza Strip on Tuesday near a key crossing point where about 150 Palestinians have been trapped while trying to flee from the territory since Hamas Islamists took it over. An Israeli army spokesperson said the tanks entered Gaza to protect the Erez crossing.
Hamas was poised to seize full control of the Gaza Strip on Thursday, overrunning key security strongholds of the rival Fatah movement after days of ferocious gun battles in the chaotic territory. The Palestine Liberation Organisation called on president Mahmoud Abbas to sack the teetering coalition government and declare a state of emergency.
Hamas Islamist gunmen pressed on with their Gaza offensive on Wednesday, killing at least eight fighters loyal to Western-backed President Mahmoud Abbas in a Palestinian power struggle bordering on civil war. Chanting ”stop the killing”, about 1 000 Palestinians marched through Gaza City — only to draw gunfire in the air from Hamas militants.
Gunmen from rival Palestinian factions fought street battles on Tuesday in a new surge of deadly violence that threatens to topple the government and drive the territory closer to civil war. Mortar shells slammed into Prime Minister Ismail Haniya’s home and the seafront compound of President Mahmoud Abbas.
Gunmen fired on the offices of the Palestinian prime minister in the Gaza Strip on Monday, disrupting a Cabinet meeting just hours after Egyptian officials helped mediate a truce between rival factions. ”We are taking fire,” an aide to Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of the Hamas Islamist movement said from the building where the meeting was suspended.
Kidnapped BBC Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston said he was in good health and being treated well in a video released on Friday, the first since militants abducted him in the Palestinian enclave over 11 weeks ago. It was the clearest evidence he was alive following his March 12 abduction.
Israel carried out an air strike near the Gaza residence of Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas on Friday, but insisted he was not the target. ”Haniyeh’s home definitely was not the target,” an Israeli army spokesperson said. Ahmed Youssef, Haniyeh’s political adviser, said the bombardment was meant to send ”a message of threats” to the prime minister.
Israel killed three suspected Hamas militants in one of four pre-dawn air strikes in Gaza on Sunday as it built up pressure on the Islamist militant group to stop the firing of makeshift rockets into the Jewish state. An Israeli army spokesperson confirmed a strike had taken place on a vehicle belonging to Hamas militants.
Israel launched more air strikes against Hamas targets in Gaza on Saturday, killing at least one person, as top officials considered a broader strategy for stopping rockets being fired at Israeli towns. The Israeli army said an air strike hit three militants firing rockets from northern Gaza.
Israel struck at Hamas targets in Gaza on Friday and threatened a more vigorous response to stop rocket attacks while Palestinian rival factions fought each other in turmoil verging on civil war. Truces agreed by Islamist Hamas and the more secular Fatah over the past week have collapsed swiftly.
An Israeli air strike destroyed a Hamas security headquarters in Gaza City on Thursday, wounding at least 40 people, in a powerful response to rocket attacks by Palestinian militants. Smoke rose from what remained of the downtown office building that housed Hamas’s Executive Force.
A tentative truce appeared to take hold in Gaza on Thursday after days of fierce fighting between rival factions that has killed dozens and sent the Palestinian unity Cabinet to the brink of collapse. Israel vowed it would hit militants firing rockets from Gaza, after becoming drawn into the fray by launching air strikes that left four gunmen dead on Wednesday.
Hamas gunmen raided the home of a top Fatah security official on Wednesday, killing five of his bodyguards, a spokesperson said, as violence spiralled in Gaza despite a new Palestinian truce deal. The attack on the house of Rashid Abu Shbak in Gaza City came hours after the rival factions announced they had agreed another truce.
Factional feuding raged on in the Gaza Strip on Monday with nine Palestinians killed in the deadliest three days of violence in months, posing a serious challenge to the unity government. Isolated pockets of shooting were reported across the densely populated and dangerous Palestinian territory.
South Africa on Thursday invited Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas to visit, in what would be his first trip outside the Muslim world. Haniyeh would like to meet with former South African president Nelson Mandela during the trip, according to a Haniyeh aide.