Rockets fired into Israel
2008-02-08 16:13
Gaza City - The Israeli military said Palestinian groups in the Gaza Strip fired 17 rockets towards Israel on Friday, without causing casualties, despite the Jewish state's squeeze on power supplies to residents.
Eleven of the primitive rockets fell in Israeli territory, including five in part of Sderot town and the other on unoccupied land south of Ashkelon.
The military source said the rockets had caused some damage. It was not known where the remaining six rockets fell, although the home-made missiles often fall short and land inside the Strip.
The Islamist movement Hamas, which has controlled Gaza since a bloody power struggle against Fatah party supporters last June, and Islamic Jihad both claimed the rocket attacks in separate statements.
Meanwhile Palestinian witnesses said an Israeli aircraft carried out a dawn raid against militants of the Popular Resistance Committees in the Gaza Strip but that there were no casualties.
Israel has tried to force Palestinians to end rocket attacks, including blockading the Gaza Strip which last month saw Palestinian militants blast holes in a border barrier to let hundreds of thousands of people stream into Egypt to buy basic supplies.
On Thursday, in one of the Israeli military's frequent operations inside Palestinian territory, seven Palestinians were killed.
The same evening, Israel began reducing supplies of electricity to the Gaza Strip, a method of pressure described by human rights groups as "collective punishment".
On Friday, Israeli public radio said the defence ministry had decided that if rocket firing continued it would each week impose an additional 1% cut on power carried by high tension lines.
The radio said the ministry claimed it would maintain supplies at a sufficient level to avoid worsening the humanitarian situation.
Alarm at the potential impact on 1.5 million people in the Palestinian territory goaded even Israel's main ally, the US, to warn against aggravating the situation.
On Thursday, ahead of the reduction, the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) group said that the planned "cuts of fuel and electricity to Gaza... amount to collective punishment of the civilian population".
Israel began reducing the amount of fuel it supplied to Gaza in late October after declaring the coastal strip a "hostile entity" following its takeover by Hamas, an Islamist movement pledged to destroying the Jewish state.
Israel's hardline Infrastructure Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer on Friday slammed those who criticised the measures while not also condemning the rocket attacks.
"No country in the world would agree to provide electricity to people who shoot at the electricity plant which supplies it to them," he said on public radio, referring to previous targeting of the Ashkelon plant.