Two Palestinian bystanders have been wounded on Monday evening after an Israeli air craft fired a missile on a car traveling on a southern Gaza road in Rafah city, witnesses said.
Initial reports said that the targeted car carried members of the armed wing of the ruling Hamas movement.
Monday’s air strike came hours after Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak vowed to continue strikes against the Palestinian resistance groups including the ruling Hamas in Gaza.
Israeli military has recently hinted at the possibility of targeting Hamas leaders, in what Israel says a ‘response to homemade shells fire’ from Gaza onto nearby Israeli towns.
Such Israeli threats against homemade shells launchers are not new, as Israel has been relentlessly engaged in a series of measures against the coastal region since June of last year, beginning with closure through fuel and power supplies cuts and limiting entry of food and medicine items to Gaza’s 1.5 million residents.
Over the past three months, the Israeli army has killed more than 200 Palestinians, most of them resistance fighters, including 16 in the past few days alone.
Palestinian homemade shells, in the meantime, have been causing few slight injuries among Israelis in southern Israel and leaving thousands of others in a state of panic.
Meanwhile, the West Bank-based Palestinian cabinet , installed by President Mahmoud Abbas right after Hamas’s takeover of Gaza June2007, decided that the latest Israeli threats for Gaza would jeopardize underway Palestinian-Israeli peace talks.
The Islamist Hamas government has shunned peace talks with Israel, until the Israeli army halts all its actions including the closure of Gaza, restriction of movement in the West Bank and construction of new settlements on the occupied east Jerusalem
Several human rights organizations worldwide have been demanding Israel to scale back its actions against Gaza, as United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon, has urged the Israeli government to reconsider all such measures.
