Hamas ends truce with rocket attack

GAZA - Hamas launched rockets at Israel today, formally ending a 16-month-old truce, after blaming Israeli artillery fire for the killing of seven Palestinians relaxing on a Gaza beach.

Amid the bloodshed, officials said President Mahmoud Abbas was weighing whether to go ahead with a planned announcement later in the day to order a referendum on a statehood proposal, opposed by Hamas, that implicitly recognises Israel.

The manifesto penned by Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails is at the heart of Abbas's power struggle with Hamas, an Islamic militant group dedicated to Israel's destruction that came to power after a January election.

An Israeli army spokesman said six rockets were fired from Gaza overnight but it was still unclear whether any had landed inside Israeli territory.

"This is only the start and rocket firings will continue," said a spokesman for Hamas's Izz el-Deen al-Qassam Brigades, a group that carried out nearly 60 suicide bombings in Israel since the start of a Palestinian uprising in 2000.

"Next time, the rockets will be longer in range and they will hit places deeper inside the Zionist entity. The attacks come in response to the Zionist crimes and the killings of civilians in Gaza," he said.

Hamas has largely abided by a truce announced in early 2005. Israeli officials, however, said the group has been helping other militant factions to carry out daily cross-border rocket attacks from Gaza, territory Israel quit last year.

Investigation

Israel said it was investigating whether its forces were responsible for killing the seven Palestinians on the beach in the northern Gaza Strip on Friday. It had been shelling the area to stop militants firing rockets over the frontier.

Among the dead were three children aged 1, 3 and 10. The Palestinian Authority declared three days of mourning.

"This may have been an accident which caused an artillery shell to fall off course, or an older unexploded shell which went off, or perhaps an explosive device which was tinkered with," said Israeli Major-General Yoav Galant.

He said he was sorry for the loss of civilian life.

Washington said Israeli artillery fire was responsible for the deaths.

"The United States expresses its regret for the killing and wounding of innocent Palestinians in Gaza ... as a result of artillery fire by the Israeli Defence Forces," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said in a statement.

In a telephone conversation early on Saturday, Abbas asked US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for immediate US intervention to stop violence from escalating, a Palestinian official said.

Before the explosion on the Gaza beach, Israel killed three men in an airstrike on what the army said was a rocket crew. Palestinians said they were civilians. Rocket fire had intensified on Friday following Israel's killing of a senior militant the day before.

Fears of increased Israeli-Palestinian violence, as well as internal Palestinian clashes, have grown as the struggle for power has intensified between Abbas and Hamas.

Hamas officials accuse Abbas of using the referendum to try to engineer the downfall of their government, which has struggled with a Western aid embargo and growing disorder.

The proposed manifesto implicitly recognises Israel by calling for a Palestinian state on all of the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank, which Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war. Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip last year.

Opinion polls show most Palestinians back the proposal, drawn up by militants imprisoned in Israel, which calls the manifesto a non-starter.

(Additional reporting by Wafa Amr in Ramallah)

- REUTERS