Israel Matzav

Security forces to go on high alert after weekend strikes

Things are heating up down in Gaza. Over the weekend, the army made two targeted strikes, which killed eight people including the seven-year old son of one of the targeted terrorists. There is a 'closure' in effect on Judea, Samaria and Gaza, at least until after the Pesach holiday, and the number of terror warnings has unfortunately been increasing:

Iyad Abu Aynayn, 29, a senior bombmaker affiliated with Hamas and the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) in the Gaza Strip was killed Friday night together with his seven-year-old son and four other armed men in a missile strike on a PRC military training camp in the southern Gaza Strip. Aynayn's wife was seriously injured in the attack. [How come the MSM never asks what a seven-year old boy and the terrorists wife are doing with a terrorist and 'four other armed men'? CiJ]

On Saturday, IAF-launched missiles slammed into a car in Gaza City killing two members of a Kassam cell which the army said had just fired a rocket towards Israel. The pair - Mahmoud Ajour and Sami Abu Shariya - were identified as members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, a violent offshoot of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah Party. A third member of the rocket squad was seriously wounded.

But despite the targeted killings and escalation in the IDF's anti-Kassam operation launched a week-and-a-half ago and dubbed "Southern Arrow", Palestinian terror cells still succeeded in launching at least five rockets at Israel over the weekend. The IDF responded with artillery barrages that pounded Kassam launch sites in addition to IAF missile strikes on two access routes used by the rocket cells in the northern Gaza Strip.

The actions drew a harsh response from the Hamas with Ghazi Hamad, a spokesman for the new government, calling the attack a brutal massacre. "Maybe it's an important message to the president (Abbas) today that Israel is not interested in peace or political compromises," he said.

Nabil Abu Rudeina, spokesman for the PA chairman, called Friday's missile strike an "unforgivable crime," adding that "Israel's destructive policy is a continuing violation of the calm and will soon have painful consequences." Abu Rudeina called on the Quartet to intervene "in order to pressure Israel to stop its attack on the Palestinians."

The heads of the Popular Resistance Committees in the Gaza Strip also issued threats and in a public message, said "the movement will not return to business as usual following the crimes committed by the Israelis. The movement's enemies will pay [and] the coming days will prove the seriousness of our intentions. The Zionist enemy must wait and see our powerful and painful response."

...

Meanwhile Saturday, IDF troops located an explosives laboratory in the Abu Sneinah neighborhood in Hebron. An explosion had rocked the laboratory on Friday night, apparently as a result of a work accident in which three Palestinians unintentionally detonated an explosive device that they were preparing to be used in an attack on IDF units operating in the city. The three Palestinians were wounded in the explosion and evacuated to a local hospital.

Update 12:39 AM:

An IAF aircraft fired missiles at a Fatah training camp near Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip late Saturday evening after spotting suspicious activity. Six Palestinians were killed in the strike. Weekend missile strikes killed a total of 14 Palestinians, including a seven-year-old boy.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:04 PM