Palestinian Missile Hits Israeli City
The Age
Thursday July 6, 2006
ISRAEL is once again vowing to step up military operations in Gaza after Palestinian militants succeeded for the first time in hitting a major Israeli city with a homemade missile.
The armed wing of Palestinian ruling party Hamas said it built and fired a new type of missile, which struck a schoolyard in the coastal city of Ashkelon.While causing no injuries, the strike demonstrates that Palestinian missiles now have a range of at least 12 kilometres, enough to threaten Ashkelon, home to 110,000 people, a major industrial zone and Israel's main oil-fired electricity plant.Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, already committed to using force to free captured Israeli soldier Corporal Gilad Shalit, said the response to the attack would have "unprecedented" consequences". "This is an escalation without precedent in the terrorist war waged by the Hamas movement that now controls the Palestinian Authority," Mr Olmert said at a reception for US Independence Day.Hours after the strike on Tuesday night, local time, Israeli missiles tore through the Palestinian Authority Interior Ministry in Gaza for the second time in a week. A number of local people, including several children, were taken to hospital with shock.The firing of Hamas' new twin-engined Qassam rocket comes less than a month after the group's armed wing ended a 15-month unilateral ceasefire, which was called off in response to a series of Israeli attacks that killed civilians and militants in Gaza.In recent months, Israel has fired thousands of heavy artillery shells and scores of missiles into Gaza in a campaign to prevent militants firing rockets at nearby Israeli communities.Due to the relatively short range of the Palestinian rockets, however, the main target until now has been the Israeli border town of Sderot, with the deaths of five civilians, the most recent in January last year.At press time yesterday, Israel was threatening to further escalate its air and ground campaigns inside the Gaza Strip, stepped up in response to the June 25 capture of Corporal Shalit in a dawn raid on his tank position on Gaza's southern border.Mr Olmert has repeatedly ruled out freeing any Palestinian security prisoners in exchange for Corporal Shalit, as demanded by his Hamas-led captors.Last week, Israeli troops arrested most of the Hamas ministers and members of parliament based in the West Bank and threatened to assassinate the group's leaders in Gaza.A statement from the militants who claim to be holding the Israeli tank gunner said there would be no further talks on his release following the expiry of a Tuesday deadline for Israel to respond.However, a statement from the smallest of the three Palestinian groups responsible for the capture of the soldier, the previously unknown Islamic Army, said it would be "un-Islamic" for them to kill their captive.OPINION? Maher Mughrabi NEWS 21
© 2006 The Age
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