Palestinian militant factions in the Gaza Strip said Wednesday they were unlikely to extend an Egyptian- brokered six-month truce with Israel that expires on Friday. Both Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and the current, outgoing Israeli government meanwhile welcomed UN Security Council resolution 1850, adopted Monday in New York, which called the Israeli- Palestinian negotiations relaunched in Annapolis, Maryland one year ago 'irreversible.'
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Abbas meanwhile urged all factions in Gaza to keep the truce with Israel, while Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak said earlier that his country would not shrink from launching a military offensive in Gaza if necessary, but was also not 'running toward' one.
'Calm in Gaza will be met with calm,' he reiterated to a conference in northern Israel late Tuesday.
Palestinian fighters in the strip fired 15 self-made rockets into southern Israel on Wednesday, in addition to one mortar shell, a military spokeswoman in Tel Aviv said, adding they brought the total number launched since Tuesday to 25. One of the missiles landed in the centre of the town Sderot, two kilometres from the Strip, injuring two people. Several others were treated for shock, and several vehicles were damaged.
Abu Obaida, a spokesman for the al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of the radical Islamic Hamas movement ruling Gaza, said his movement was not 'rushing' toward extending the truce. The al-Qassam Brigades 'regards the calm (truce), in its current form, as unsuitable for extension,' he told reporters in Gaza.
Both Israel and Hamas have been using the Hebrew and Arabic terms for 'calm' to describe the truce, underscoring that it is an informal and indirect agreement between two parties which do not recognize each other.
Other armed factions active in Gaza also voiced negative assessments about the truce. Naffez Azzam, of the Islamic Jihad, said it had 'served the Israeli occupation rather than the Palestinian people' and criticized the undetermined stance of his faction.
The Islamic Jihad claimed credit for firing most of Wednesday's rockets, saying they were revenge for the killing of one of their militants during an Israeli arrest raid in the West Bank city of Jenin earlier this week. The Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) too claimed responsibility for some of the rockets.
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) said 'Friday will be the final end to the calm, which already collapsed in the middle because of Israel which increased its attacks and tightened its siege on the Palestinian people,' a Gaza leader, Kayed al-Ghoul said.
The truce, which had largely held for five months, began disintegrating in early November, when five Hamas militants were killed in a heavy clash near the Gaza border with Israeli soldiers, who had uncovered a tunnel dug by militants and who Israel had said had planned to infiltrate into its territory.
Although sporadic, one-off rockets also landed in Israel before that November 4 clash, militants have stepped up their rocket fire since then. Israel has responded by renewing its near-total blockade of the strip, shutting its border crossings to all but periodic shipments of basic humanitarian aid.