Israel, Hamas threaten to fight to finish

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip: Israel killed seven Palestinians, including two fugitive militants and a two-year-old girl, in its third rocket strike at Hamas targets in 24 hours yesterday, as Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the Islamic militant group threatened a fight to the finish.

The increasingly deadly confrontation — with 37 killed and more than 130 wounded on both sides in just two days — left little hope that US President George W Bush’s Mideast peace  initiative, launched just a week ago, will survive. The US-backed peace plan calls on the Palestinians to dismantle militant groups and on Israel to refrain from actions that undermine trust. However, Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas insists he cannot use force against the militants who have rebuffed his truce offers, and Sharon says he will not wait for Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, to negotiate a deal with them. “If I need to choose between the war on terror and supporting Abu Mazen, I will chose the first option,” Sharon told his Cabinet yesterday. Sharon ridiculed Palestinian leaders as “crybabies” for saying they can’t crack down on Hamas.

Palestinians, in turn, accused Sharon of doing everything he can to sabotage the “road map” peace plan, leading to Palestinian statehood by 2005. “His (Sharon’s) aim is to discredit the Palestinian government and to assassinate his real enemy, which is the road map,” said Palestinian Cabinet Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo. The chain of events began last week with a Mideast peace summit, at which Sharon and Abbas promised Bush to get started on the peace plan. Two days later, a Hamas leader, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, announced that the group is breaking off truce talks with Abbas, and over the weekend, gunmen from Hamas and other militias killed five Israeli soldiers in shootings.

On Tuesday, Israel tried to kill Rantisi, who escaped a missile strike with minor injuries. Hamas threatened re-venge, and on Wednesday, a Hamas suicide bomber killed 17 people in a Jerusalem bus blast. That attack was followed by three rocket strikes against Hamas fugitives that killed 18 Palestinians in Gaza City, half of them civilians. In the wake of the bloodshed, Israel and Hamas exchanged new threats that suggested a new stage in 32 months of fighting. In perhaps its harshest warning since it first set off suicide bombings in the mid-1990s, Hamas said it was ordering “all military cells to act immediately and act like an earthquake to blow up the Zionist entity and tear it to pieces.” The group said foreigners should leave for their safety. Hamas has generally acted on its threats. Sharon, in turn, said he would fight militants “to the bitter end,” regardless of the road map.