Gaza militants blow up Israeli army post

1.00pm - By NIDAL AL-MUGHRABI

GAZA - Palestinian militants blew up an Israeli military post near a Jewish settlement in the southern Gaza Strip on Sunday, causing at least six casualties, emergency services said.

Israeli Channel 10 Television said one soldier was believed dead in the blast, but emergency services were uncertain there had been fatalities. They said one soldier had been trapped in the rubble. Ambulance workers revised down initial estimates of dozens of casualties.

The militants dug a 350m tunnel under the army post near the southern Gaza Strip settlement of Gush Katif and set off a large quantity of explosives. Witnesses reported hearing two enormous explosions rip through the base.

Rescue efforts were hampered by Palestinian militants, who opened heavy gun and mortar fire at emergency workers and soldiers who came to the scene on a road leading to the settlement bloc. The militant Islamic Hamas movement and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed group in President Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction, both claimed responsibility for the night-time attack.

They said it was retaliation for Israel's assassination of two top Hamas leaders earlier this year as well as the killing of a leader of the al-Aqsa Brigades in the West Bank city of Nablus on Saturday.

Hamas later said in a statement that it carried out the attack alone.

The attack was a blow to the Israeli army in Gaza, where it lost 13 troops in ambushes last month.

Violence has surged in Gaza since February, when Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced a plan to quit the desert territory, which many Israelis see as a costly liability. The cabinet approved his initiative in principle on June 6.

Militants sworn to destroying Israel want to portray any withdrawal as a victory, while the army is determined to smash them before pulling out of the strip, which was captured in the 1967 Middle East war.

Scores of Palestinians were killed in a huge raid into Gaza last month following the deaths of the Israeli soldiers.

Israeli forces on Sunday ended their deadliest raid in the West Bank for months after killing the commander of the al-Aqsa Brigades militant group.

Israeli security sources said Nayef Abu Sharkh, 38, was responsible for numerous attempts, some financed by the pro-Iranian Lebanese group Hizbollah, to dispatch suicide bombers to Israel.

A senior Fatah official said Abu Sharkh had been at odds with Arafat over empowering new leaders within the movement and ending corruption.

- REUTERS