GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip, April 13, (Agencies): Israeli forces fired at Gaza militants from helicopters and tanks early Tuesday, killing at least two Palestinians and wounding three, witnesses and medics said.
The clash erupted Tuesday near a border crossing in central Gaza. The Israeli military said it struck a group of Palestinians planting explosives near the border fence.
The Islamic Jihad group said it clashed with Israeli forces who entered Gaza. The militants said they came under fire from a helicopter and Israeli tanks. The body of a 23-year-old Islamic Jihad fighter was taken to a Gaza hospital immediately after the fighting. Later, a second body was retrieved from the area, said an Associated Press cameraman at the scene.
Gaza’s Hamas rulers have tried to maintain a cease-fire with Israel since the end of the Gaza war in January 2009. However, smaller militant groups sporadically carry out attacks.
Earlier this month, the militant Islamic group indicated it was trying to keep attacks on Israel in check, following a string of Palestinian rocket assaults on southern Israel and retaliatory Israeli strikes.
Islamic Jihad said that on Sunday, Hamas police detained several of its fighters, along with those from another group, and forced them to sign pledges that they would not engage in attacks on Israel.
“They (the fighters) were taken to jail, humiliated and asked to sign a pledge that they will never take any action against the Zionist enemy,” said a spokesman for the group, who used nom de guerre Abu Ahmed. He said such conflicts were resolved in a cordial manner in the past.
Most of the rocket attacks on Israel had been claimed by groups considered more radical than Hamas. These groups accuse Hamas of going soft on its armed confrontation against Israel.
Last year, Israel carried out a devastating military offensive in Gaza after years of rocket attacks. Since then, Hamas has tried to avoid provoking sweeping Israeli military action. It has not claimed responsibility for any rockets for more than a year. Israel holds Hamas responsible for maintaining quiet on the Gaza border.
Hamas, an Iranian-backed militant group, seized control of Gaza nearly three years ago after routing forces loyal to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
Meanwhile, the 22-member Arab League called on the Palestinians on Tuesday to refuse to heed amended orders from the Israeli military that could trigger deportations from the occupied West Bank.
The pan-Arab organisation pledged its “full support for Palestinian steps in the occupied territories to resist this decision.”
Its statement called on Palestinians “to reject and not cooperate and acquiesce in it.”
An Israeli newspaper said amendments to an existing order on preventing infiltration could apply to Palestinians living in the West Bank without official ID cards issued by Israel, as well as to Israelis and foreigners working in areas under limited Palestinian control.
The Israeli military insisted that the new orders merely formalise existing procedures and said there would be no new wave of deportations from the territory.
More than 200 Palestinians held a sit-in demonstration on Tuesday against an Israeli threat to expel Palestinians lacking proper identification from the occupied West Bank.
“Smash Israeli apartheid, free Palestine,” the demonstrators chanted at the protest in the centre of the West Bank city of Ramallah, the political capital of the Palestinian Authority.
“I have the right to move inside my country.”
And Palestinian premier Salam Fayyad said on the sidelines of a donor meeting in Madrid that the expulsion threat was “in every way illegal.”
However, Israel’s army on Monday denied it plans to carry out mass expulsions of Palestinians living in the West Bank after a new military policy came into force.
The policy “will make it possible to better defend those those affected by an order of repatriation because it envisages the creation of a legal commission which such people may call upon,” a military official said.