Tag Archives: Gaza Strip

Six killed as Israel destroys Gaza tunnel

An Israeli soldier walks near the border line, between Israel and the Gaza Strip, in Israel October 30, 2017.

By Nidal al-Mughrabi and Dan Williams

GAZA/JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Six Palestinian militants were killed on Monday when Israel blew up what it said was a tunnel being dug across the Gaza Strip border.

A source for the Islamic Jihad militant group said Arafat Abu Marshould, head of the faction’s armed wing in central Gaza, was killed along with a senior associate and two other gunmen. The group said it had put its fighters on “full alert.”

The armed wing of the Islamist Hamas group said two of its gunmen were killed while trying to rescue Islamic Jihad men working in the tunnel. Gaza health officials said nine people were wounded.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in remarks to legislators of his right-wing Likud party, said “groundbreaking technology” aided the tunnel’s discovery, but gave no details.

Israel has been constructing a sensor-equipped underground wall along the 60-km (36-mile) Gaza border, aiming to complete the $1.1 billion project by mid-2019.

During the last Gaza war in 2014, Hamas fighters used dozens of tunnels to blindside Israel’s superior forces and threaten civilian communities near the frontier, a counterpoint to the Iron Dome anti-missile system that largely protected the country’s heartland from militant rocket barrages.

Lieutenant-Colonel Jonathan Conricus, an Israeli military spokesman, said the tunnel destroyed on Monday was in the process of being dug from the Gaza town of Khan Younis across the border, where it was blown up.

Asked by reporters if Hamas, rather than another armed faction, had dug it, Conricus said: “I cannot confirm that.”

“The IDF (Israel Defence Forces) does not intend to escalate the situation but stands prepared for a variety of scenarios,” Conricus said. “The working assumption is that this is not the only tunnel that Palestinian terrorist organizations are trying to dig.”

“We see Hamas as being responsible for any attempt emanating from its territory, and carried out by people who are under its authority, to impinge on our sovereignty,” Netanyahu told the Likud lawmakers, stopping short of accusing Hamas directly of digging the tunnel.

Islamic Jihad spokesman Daoud Shehab in a statement said Israel’s bombing of “a tunnel of the resistance is a terrorist aggression” and Palestinian resistance factions retained the right to respond “at the suitable time”.

Hamas reached a reconciliation deal with Western-backed President Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority earlier this month, a decade after Hamas seized the Gaza Strip in a brief civil war.

Israel and the United States have called for Hamas to be disarmed as part of the pact so Israeli peace efforts with Abbas, which collapsed in 2014, could proceed. Hamas has rejected the demand.

On Saturday, UNRWA, the main U.N. welfare agency for Palestinians said it had discovered “what appeared to be a tunnel” underneath one of its schools in Gaza on Oct. 15 and had sealed the cavity.

 

 

(Editing by Jeffrey Heller and Janet Lawrence)

 

Hamas to soften stance on Israel, Muslim Brotherhood in policy document

A young Palestinian loyal to Hamas stands under the stage in front of a poster depicting late Hamas spiritual leader Ahmed Yassin (L) during a rally in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip

DOHA (Reuters) – The Palestinian Islamist group Hamas will remove a call for Israel’s destruction and drop its association with the Muslim Brotherhood in a new policy document to be issued on Monday, Gulf Arab sources said.

Hamas’s move appears aimed at improving relations with Gulf Arab states and Egypt, which label the Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, as well as with Western countries, many of which classify Hamas as a terrorist group over its hostility to Israel.

The sources said Hamas, which has controlled the Gaza Strip since 2007, will say in the document that it agrees to a transitional Palestinian state along the borders from 1967, when Israel captured Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem in a war with Arab states. Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005.

A future state encompassing Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem along 1967 borders is the goal of Hamas’ main political rival, the Fatah movement led by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. His Palestinian Authority has engaged in peace talks with Israel on that basis, although the last, U.S.-mediated round collapsed three years ago.

The revised Hamas political document, to be announced later on Monday, will still reject Israel’s right to exist and back  “armed struggle” against it, the Gulf Arab sources told Reuters.

Hamas has fought three wars with Israel since 2007 and has carried out hundreds of armed attacks in Israel and in Israeli-occupied territories since it was founded three decades ago.

It remains unclear whether the document replaces or changes in any way Hamas’s 1988 charter, which calls for Israel’s destruction and is the Islamist group’s covenant.

A Hamas spokesman in Qatar declined to comment. There was no immediate comment from Egypt and Gulf Arab states.

Arab sources said the Hamas document was being released ahead of a planned visit by Abbas to Washington on May 3 and as Donald Trump administration prepares to make a renewed push for Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Analysts say the revised document could allow Hamas to mend relations with Western countries and pave the way for a reconciliation agreement with the Palestine Liberation Organisation, now also headed by Abbas.

U.S.-allied Arab states including Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia classify the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization. The 89-year-old Brotherhood held power in Egypt for a year after a popular uprising in 2011.

The Brotherhood denies links with Islamist militants and advocates Islamist political parties winning power through elections, which Saudi Arabia considers a threat to its system of absolute power through inherited rule.

(Reporting by Tom Finn; editing by Mark Heinrich)

Israeli aircraft attack Hamas targets after rocket fired from Gaza

Smoke rises following what police said was an Israeli air strike in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip February 27, 2017.

GAZA (Reuters) – Israeli aircraft carried out a series of strikes in Gaza on Monday, wounding at least four people, witnesses said, after a rocket fired from the Palestinian territory hit an empty area in southern Israel.

The Israeli military said its planes attacked five positions belonging to Hamas, the Islamist group that runs the Gaza Strip, in response to the rocket strike.

Witnesses said the four wounded were bystanders.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the rocket attack. Israel said that it holds Hamas accountable for what happens in the territory.

The group has observed a de-facto ceasefire with Israel since a 2014 war but small armed cells of jihadist Salafis have continued to occasionally launch rockets at Israel. When those attacks occur, Hamas usually orders its fighters to vacate potential targets for Israeli retaliation.

Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman said Israel had “no desire or intention to initiate any military move in the Gaza Strip” but that it would not tolerate even a “drizzle” of rocket fire.

“We will not get into a ping-pong situation of fire and counter-fire. I suggest Hamas take responsibility, impose order and calm down,” Lieberman said in public remarks to legislators of his Yisrael Beitenu party in Jerusalem.

Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said Israel would be responsible for any escalation if it continued to target “resistance positions”.

(Reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi; Writing by Jeffrey Heller; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

Israel wraps up illegal outpost evacuation, promises new settlement

An Israeli settler touches the floor of a synagogue after it was evacuated during the second day of an operation by Israeli forces to evict the illegal outpost of Amona in the occupied West Bank

By Rami Amichay

AMONA, West Bank (Reuters) – Israeli police dragged nationalist youths out of a barricaded synagogue on Thursday, completing the forced evacuation of an illegal outpost in the West Bank even as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised to build evicted families a new settlement.

Some 100 youngsters protesting against the removal of some 300 settlers from Amona, an outpost built without Israeli government authorization, kicked at police who used a high-pressure hose and a wooden pole to batter down sheet metal and furniture blocking the entrances to the synagogue.

The teenagers painted a Nazi swastika on a synagogue wall next to a slogan denouncing the police.

The evacuation began on Wednesday, when most of the families that settled in Amona were removed. But the youths holed up in the synagogue overnight.

Police, announcing that Amona had been cleared, said some 60 officers were slightly hurt in the two-day operation. Hospitals reported that at least four protesters had been treated for injuries.

Amona, built in 1995, was the largest of scores of outposts erected in the West Bank without formal approval. Israel’s Supreme Court ruled last November that it must be evacuated because it stands on privately-owned Palestinian land.

NETANYAHU PLEDGE

In a statement late on Wednesday and again in a speech in the West Bank on Thursday, Netanyahu said a new settlement would be built for Amona’s families and that a committee would be set up to locate a site.

“We will work to have it happen as soon as possible,” he said, speaking in the West Bank settlement of Ariel.

Once constructed, it will be the first new settlement built in the West Bank since 1999. Construction in existing settlements has raised to 350,000 the number of Israelis living in the territory, which was captured in the 1967 Middle East war. Another 200,000 Israelis live in East Jerusalem, also seized in that conflict.

Most countries consider all Israeli settlements to be illegal. Israel disagrees, citing historical and political links to the land – which the Palestinians also assert – as well as security interests.

Since Donald Trump took office as U.S. president on Jan. 20, Israel has announced plans for almost 6,000 more settlement homes in the West Bank, drawing European and Palestinian condemnation but no criticism from the White House.

Trump, a Republican, has signaled he could be more accommodating toward settlements than his Democratic predecessor Barack Obama.

Palestinians want to establish a state in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip, which Israeli forces and settlers left in 2005, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

(Writing by Ori Lewis; Editing by Gareth Jones)

Israeli parliament to vote on bill legalizing settlement outposts

Jewish settlers preparing for eviction

By Jeffrey Heller

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel’s parliament is widely expected to vote into law on Monday a bill retroactively legalizing about 4,000 settler homes built on privately-owned Palestinian land, a measure the attorney-general has said is unconstitutional.

Passage of the legislation, backed by the right-wing government and condemned by Palestinians as a blow to statehood hopes, may be largely symbolic, however, as it goes against Israeli Supreme Court rulings on property rights. Critics and some legal experts say it will not survive judicial challenges.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had privately opposed the bill, which won preliminary parliamentary approval in November amid international denunciations and speculation in Israel it would subsequently die a quiet death in committee.

But the far-right Jewish Home party, a member of the governing coalition looking to draw voters from the traditional base of Netanyahu’s Likud, pressed to revive the legislation.

With Netanyahu under criminal investigation over allegations of abuse of office, and Likud slipping in polls, the right-wing leader risked alienating supporters and ceding ground to Jewish Home if he opposed the move. He has denied any wrongdoing.

While the measure seems certain to stoke further international condemnation of Israeli settlement policies – the Obama White House described the first vote two months ago as “troubling” – Netanyahu could get a more muted response from Republican President Donald Trump.

An Israeli announcement last week of plans for 2,500 more settlement homes in the West Bank caused no discernable waves with the new U.S. administration, whose spokesman responded to by describing Israel as a “huge ally”.

The government sought parliamentary approval of the bill despite Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit’s description of it as unconstitutional and in breach of international law since it allows the expropriation of private land in territory Israel seized in the 1967 Middle East war.

The homes covered by the legislation are in outposts built deep in the West Bank without Israeli government approval.

The new law would allow settlers to hold on to land if, as stated by the bill, they “innocently” took it – ostensibly without knowing the tracts were owned by Palestinians – or if homes were built there at the state’s instruction. Palestinian owners would receive financial compensation from Israel.

Supporters say it will enable thousands of settlers to live without fear their homes could be demolished at the order of courts responding to petitions by Palestinians or Israeli anti-settlement organizations. Palestinians see it as a land grab.

Most countries view all Israeli settlement in occupied territory as illegal. Israel disputes this.

(Editing by Jeffrey Heller and Andrew Heavens)

Hamas sets ‘honey traps’ to hack Israeli soldiers’ phones: army

Israeli soldier calling his mother on mobile phone

By Maayan Lubell

TEL AVIV (Reuters) – Using photos of young women and Hebrew slang, the Palestinian militant group Hamas chatted up dozens of Israeli soldiers online, gaining control of their phone cameras and microphones, the military said on Wednesday.

An officer, who briefed reporters on the alleged scam, said the Islamist group that runs the Gaza Strip uncovered no major military secrets in the intelligence-gathering operation.

Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum declined to comment.

Mainly using Facebook, Hamas used fake online identities and photos of young women, apparently found on the Internet, to lure soldiers in, the officer said.

“Just a second, I’ll send you a photo, my dear,” one “woman” wrote.

“OK. Ha-ha,” the soldier replied, before a photo of a blonde woman in a swimsuit popped up.

The “woman” then suggested they both download “a simple app that lets us have a video chat”, according to an example of an exchange provided by the officer.

The officer said most of the soldiers were low-ranking and that Hamas was mostly interested in gathering information about Israeli army manoeuvres, forces and weaponry in the Gaza area.

The military discovered the hacking when soldiers began reporting other suspicious online activity on social networks and uncovered dozens of fake identities used by the group to target the soldiers, the officer said.

In 2001, a 16-year-old Israeli was lured to the occupied West Bank, where he was shot dead by Palestinian gunmen, after entering into an online relationship with a Palestinian woman who posed as an American tourist.

(Additional reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza; Editing by Jeffrey Heller and Louise Ireland)

Israeli aircraft attack Hamas after rocket hits Israeli town

Smoke rises following what witnesses said was an Israeli air strike, east of Gaza City

By Nidal al-Mughrabi

GAZA (Reuters) – Israeli aircraft attacked Palestinian militant targets in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, wounding at least one person, witnesses said, after a rocket fired from the enclave hit an Israeli border town.

Israeli police said there were no casualties in the rocket strike on Sderot, but Israel has a declared policy of responding militarily to any attack from the Hamas-run Gaza Strip.

Three Hamas training camps and a security complex were targeted in the air strikes and a passerby was hurt, witnesses said. An Israeli military spokeswoman had no immediate comment.

Hamas has observed a de facto ceasefire with Israel since 2014, but small jihadist cells in the Gaza Strip occasionally fire rockets across the border.

A previously unknown group, “The Grandchildren of the Followers of the Prophet” said in a statement posted on several websites that it carried out the Sderot attack in the name of “oppressed brothers and sisters” under Israeli occupation.

In Sderot, metal fragments and a small crater in a street marked the spot where the rocket exploded. The blast shattered windows in a nearby home and damaged a car.

Shortly after the attack, Israeli tank shells struck a Hamas observation post near the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun. Local residents said there were no casualties.

Several hours later, Israeli aircraft hit the training camps, in the southern and central parts of the Gaza Strip, as well as a security complex in the north, witnesses said.

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri issued a statement warning Israel against continuing what he termed its aggression. “Hamas stresses it can not keep silent if the escalation continues,” he said.

Militants in the Gaza Strip last fired a rocket into Israel on Aug. 21, in an incident that also caused no casualties, and drew an Israeli air strike and tank shelling.

(Reporting by Jeffrey Heller and Nidal al-Mughrabi; Writing by Jeffrey Heller; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)

Israel building an underground barrier along Gaza border

The sun sets over the Gaza Strip, as seen from the Israeli side

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel has begun construction of an underground barrier along the frontier with the Gaza Strip that is meant to block cross-border tunnels built by Palestinian militants, Israeli defense and political sources said on Thursday.

Since being blindsided during a 2014 war by tunnel raiders from the Hamas Islamist group that controls Gaza, Israel has stepped up work on technologies for spotting the secret passages. Currently Israel has a fence along the border.

Military engineers unearthed and destroyed 32 tunnels during the war, Israeli officials say, and the military has since uncovered two others.

A general view shows the Israeli border with the Gaza Strip, as seen from the Israeli side,

A general view shows the Israeli border with the Gaza Strip, as seen from the Israeli side, September 8, 2016. REUTERS/Amir Cohen

One Israeli political source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the government has already budgeted some 600 million shekels ($160 million) to build one section of the underground concrete barrier.

The barrier will eventually be about 65 km about 40 miles in length, the source said.

Israel’s Defense Ministry declined to comment on the issue.

($1 = 3.7521 shekels)

(Reporting by Ari Rabinovitch)

Israel discovers 2nd cross border tunnel built by Hamas

An entrance to a tunnel which Israel's military said it had discovered is seen just outside the southern Gaza Strip

By Eli Berlzon

SUFA, Israel (Reuters) – Israel’s military said it had discovered a cross-border tunnel on Thursday built by the Islamist group Hamas from the Gaza Strip during a rare flare-up of violence along a border that has been largely quiet since a 2014 war.

Gaza hospital officials said a 54-year-old woman had been killed and a man wounded by fragments of an Israeli tank shell fired near Rafah during the violence, which erupted on Wednesday.

Israel’s Shin Bet undercover intelligence agency said a Hamas operative arrested last month had provided useful information about the tunnel networks in the area, though it did not explicitly attribute Thursday’s discovery to his data.

Gaza analysts said the flare-up of violence, the most intense since the 2014 war, threatened the truce that has largely held in the area for nearly two years.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was set to convene senior ministers on Friday to discuss the situation. Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon said after touring the area that Israel would not be deterred by Hamas’s threats and would continue to search “until all the tunnels are found.”

A senior Hamas official, Khalil al-Hayya, said efforts by Qatar and Egypt were ongoing to try to restore calm, but he warned that “Israeli incursions into Gaza would not be tolerated.”

Militants fired mortar shells at Israeli forces working to unearth the tunnel and Israel responded with tank fire and air strikes, an army spokeswoman said. The violence had subsided by late Thursday night and there was a period of calm toward midnight.

Israeli aircraft earlier targeted four Hamas positions in the vicinity of the tunnel, the military said. During Wednesday and Thursday, there were 10 instances of Hamas fire against Israeli forces operating in the area, it added.

Hamas, Gaza’s de facto ruler, has not confirmed responsibility for the shelling and did not comment on the announcement of the tunnel’s discovery.

TUNNEL SEARCH

Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Lerner, an Israeli military spokesman, said the tunnel unearthed on Thursday was situated 28 meters (31 yards) below the surface and that an investigation was under way to determine whether it was dug before or after the war.

Lerner said the militants may have started firing mortars at the Israeli forces to prevent them discovering the tunnel. Last month a first tunnel was unearthed without incident.

But the armed wing of Hamas said the tunnel was not new and had been in use in the early part of the war in 2014.

Israel has been wary about discussing what means it has employed to uncover the tunnels but the arrest of Mahmoud Atouna, 29, from Jabalya in the northern Gaza Strip early last month may have helped.

“Atouna provided his interrogators much information about the tunnel routes in the northern Gaza Strip, its tunnel-digging methods, the use of private homes and public buildings to bore tunnels and materials used,” Shin Bet said in a statement on Thursday.

More than 2,100 Palestinians, mostly civilians, were killed during the 2014 Gaza conflict. Sixty-seven Israeli soldiers and six civilians in Israel were killed by rockets and attacks by Hamas and other militant groups.

(Additional reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza, Writing by Dan Williams and Ori Lewis; editing by Gareth Jones, G Crosse)

Biden says Israel settlements raise questions about commitment to peace

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Vice President Joe Biden called on Israel’s government on Sunday to demonstrate its commitment to a two-state solution to end the conflict with the Palestinians and said settlement expansion is weakening prospects for peace.

“Israel’s government’s steady and systematic process of expanding settlements, legalizing outposts, seizing land, is eroding in my view the prospect of a two-state solution,” Biden said in a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a leading pro-Israel lobbying group.

Biden said he did not agree with Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government that expanded settlements would not interfere with any effort to settle the conflict.

“Bibi (Netanyahu) thinks it can be accommodated, and I believe he believes it. I don’t,” Biden said.

Biden said the region instead seems to be moving toward a one-state solution, which he termed dangerous.

“There is no political will at this moment among Israelis or Palestinians to move forward with serious negotiations. And that’s incredibly disappointing,” Biden said.

Israel says it intends to keep large settlement blocs in any future peace agreement with the Palestinians. Palestinians, who seek to establish a state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, say they fear Israeli settlement expansion will deny them a viable country.

Palestinians have cited Israeli settlement activity as one of the factors behind the collapse of U.S.-brokered peace talks in 2014, and a surge of violence over the past five months has dimmed hopes negotiations could be revived any time soon.

“We’ve stressed to both parties the need to take meaningful steps to demonstrate their commitment to a two-state solution that extends beyond mere words,” Biden said.

“There’s got to be a little ‘show-me.’ This cannot continue to erode,” he said.

Biden was cheered for criticizing what he called Palestinian actions at the United Nations to undermine Israel, and he said changes in the region, including the united fight against Islamic State militants, could help thaw relations between Israel and its neighbors.

Israel and the United States are also in talks on a generous military assistance agreement, he said.

“It will, without a doubt, be the most generous security assistance package in the history of the United States,” Biden said of a pact expected to be worth billions of dollars annually to the Jewish state, the largest recipient of such U.S. assistance.

(Reporting by Patricia Zengerle; Editing by Richard Pullin)