Jihad will observe Gaza truce

2008-06-26 09:10

Gaza - Islamic Jihad on Wednesday said it will respect a shaky truce with Israel in force since last week but warned of a fitting response in case of a breach.

"We have confirmed to our friends in Hamas that we have decided to respect the ceasefire," spokesperson Daoud Shihab said in Gaza after talks with Hamas.

"We will apply the pact on the suspension of attacks if Israel also respects it," he told AFP.

But he warned that a "committee comprising representatives of Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Fatah will meet when Israel breaches the truce to determine a riposte."

The ceasefire came into effect in and around the Gaza Strip on June 19 under a deal reached after Egypt mediated for months between Israel and Hamas, the Islamist movement that rules the impoverished Palestinian enclave.

Three rockets

But three rockets fired from Gaza hit southern Israel on Tuesday, slightly wounding two people and straining the Egyptian-brokered truce.

Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the attacks, calling them a response to the killing of one of its senior fighters in a gunbattle hours earlier in the occupied West Bank, which was not included in the truce.

The group, which regularly fired rockets and mortar rounds at southern Israel in the months leading to the ceasefire, had not agreed to the truce but vowed not to violate it.

"Any fire from the Gaza Strip is a gross violation of the understanding reached with Egypt," Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's spokesperson Mark Regev told AFP, adding that Hamas bore responsibility for any attack from Gaza.

He said the attacks violated "two cardinal points of the understandings reached through Egypt, namely that the truce applies only to the Gaza Strip and not to the West Bank and that it concerns all armed groups."

Hamas accused Israel of provoking other armed groups with its actions in the West Bank, and said troops had fired on Gazan farmers working the pock-marked land near the border with Israel on Wednesday.

- AFP