One Palestinian was dead and six Palestinians and Israelis were wounded in shelling attacks on Wednesday, days before a six-month truce was to expire.
Palestinian militants launched some 20 rockets and one mortar shell from Gaza at southern Israel by late Wednesday evening, a military spokeswoman in Tel Aviv said.
One of them landed just outside a shopping center in the southern Israeli town of Sderot, slightly injuring three Israelis.
The radical Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for firing 18 rockets from Gaza, adding in separate leaflets sent to reporters that the attacks are a response “to the Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people.”
Later on Wednesday, an Israeli artillery shell hit Palestinian houses in northern Gaza, killing one Palestinian and wounding three other civilians, medics and eyewitnesses said.
TRUCE
The Egyptian-brokered six-month informal truce between Israel and Palestinian armed factions in the strip is due to expire early today.
After the Palestinian rocket attacks, Israeli caretaker Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned that Israel would respond to the surge of attacks.
“It is clear that this fire only sharpens what we have said all the time. There cannot be a situation in which it has been agreed that there is calm [a truce], but at the same time the reality on the ground is complete different,” he told reporters as he cast his vote in a primary of his ruling Kadima party.
“Of course this requires us to relate to it and [we] will relate to it,” he said.
Despite the warnings, senior Israeli defense officials told Israel’s Channel 1 television they believe “this is not the time for a broad [military] operation in Gaza,” while also Channel 10 television reported that the Israeli military and defense ministry were “very uneager to return to Gaza” three years after Israel unilaterally withdrew from the strip in 2005.
BROAD ACTION
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak reiterated on Wednesday evening that Israel does “not shrink from a broad action in Gaza, but we are also not running toward such an action. When the situation obliges us to act, we will act.”
Eyewitnesses in Gaza said that an Israeli tank stationed near the border between Israel and Gaza fired a shell that landed near the northern Gaza town of Jabalia.
Paramedics in the area said they found a Palestinian civilian dead in his house right after the shell struck the area, adding that three other civilians in another neighboring house were wounded.
The chief of emergency and ambulance service in the Palestinian health ministry, Mo’aweya Hassanein, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur news agency that two of those who had been hurt were seriously wounded.
Hamas and other militant groups said earlier that they won’t extend the truce for another six months unless Israel keeps Gaza crossings opened and stops military operations into the poor enclave ruled by Hamas.
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