Olmert vows no let-up in Gaza military operations

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert vowed yesterday to continue to hit Gaza after Palestinian militants carried out the first cross-border raid into Israel in nearly a year.

"Our operations in Gaza will continue as long as the rocket fire and the terror attacks continue," Olmert said at the opening of the weekly Cabinet meeting.

Olmert did not say if Israeli military strikes in Gaza would increase, after militants drove to a border fence in a jeep, breached it and attacked an army post on the other side.

The post was unmanned at the time, but exchanges of fire with troops sent to the scene left one militant dead while three others made it back inside Gaza. The army did not report any casualties.

The raid near the Kissufim crossing was carried out jointly by the radical Islamic Jihad and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a group loosely linked to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah party.

It marked the first cross-border raid since an operation on June 25 last year in which militants tunneled out of Gaza and attacked an army post, killing two soldiers and seizing a third, Corporal Gilad Shalit, who remains in captivity.

Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz said the latest raid was also aimed at capturing a soldier while Olmert called it an attempt to "further complicate the situation."

"The central objective of the terrorist organizations was to hit Israel, to carry out a kidnapping and in this way to put us into difficulties," Peretz told public radio.

Olmert and the Palestinian journalist union condemned the groups' use of a white jeep with "TV" insignia, a photo of which was published in an Israeli daily. On Saturday the groups said the jeep used was camouflaged as an army vehicle.

"Yesterday terrorists used a car with TV insignia in order to confuse the soldiers and take advantage of our special sensitivity as a democratic country to allow the media to work in these sensitive areas," Olmert said.

In a statement in Gaza, the Palestinian journalists union said: "Using a car with press insignia puts in danger journalists' lives and gives an excuse to occupation forces to target and kill journalists."

"We demand that everyone stop using such methods or the word `press' for all actions that don't have anything to do with journalism," it said.

Israel's foreign press association also blasted the use of the jeep as "a grave development" and condemned "those that carried it out."

Israel carried out an air raid early yesterday against Islamic Jihad offices in Gaza City wounding two people, medics said.

Israel has been pounding militant targets in Gaza since May 16, when it resumed raids after a six-month ceasefire in response to a sharp increase in rocket fire from the territory.

Meanwhile, Hamas and Fatah agreed early yesterday to a new truce with the help of Egyptian mediators following clashes near the southern town of Rafah that left a civilian and a militant dead and 40 others wounded.