Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas emphasized Saturday the need to stop ‘aimless’ homemade rockets fire into nearby Israeli towns in northern Gaza Strip in light of recent heightened Israeli deadly attacks on Palestinian targets inside the Palestinian territories on Gaza-Israel-border.
The President’s remarks, reported by WAFA News Agency, came during a graduation ceremony of a military training program for the Presidential Guards in Gaza.
The President also called on his forces to exert utmost efforts to contain security laps across the Gaza Strip and help maintain law and order in the unruly coastal region.
Since last Wednesday, the Israeli army has killed at least two Palestinian resistance fighters to the north of Gaza and wounded a number of others, involving farmers, according to medics.
As of early Saturday, the Israeli warplanes fired missiles at a group of Palestinians, the Israeli army claimed they were moving in a suspicious way, killing one and injuring another.
In a joint statement by the Islamic Jihad group and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, announced that some of their members have been rocketed by Israeli army helicopters.
Latest developments on the ground are the first of their type since both Palestinians and Israel agreed last November to a ceasefire that would halt Israeli attacks on Gaza in return for cessation of Palestinian resistance homemade shells into Israeli areas.
Israeli defense minister, Amir Perets, ordered recently his troops to launch a small-scale attack on Gaza Strip, under what he termed an attempt to prevent Palestinian rockets from being fired into Israeli towns.
Since a ceasefire deal has been reached, Palestinian resistance fighters have continued to frequently launch homemade shells onto Israeli areas, in what they term ‘retaliation’ to continued Israeli army attacks on the West Bank.
In the meantime, Egyptian Foreign Minister, Ahmad Abu Elgheit harshly criticized the latest spate of Israeli attacks on Gaza, calling them ‘counterproductive to peace efforts’.
Abu Elgheit said “the Israeli actions do not add to the ongoing efforts, to bring the peace process back to track”.
The Egyptian minister called on both Israel and the Palestinians to refrain from any further attacks, in order to give a chance to peacemaking efforts.
For the past few months the region has been seeing increased diplomacy by major international players involving the United States and the European Union, in a bid to revive the Palestinian-Israeli peace process, stalled since September2000.
