Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniya last Friday evening condemned the Israeli Army for firing into a crowd and killing two Palestinian women during a siege in Beit Hanoun, northern Gaza earlier in the day.
He said the event was part of a ‘planned annihilation’ of the Palestinians.
He called on UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to come to see the ‘massacres’ committed against them.
Hamas spokesman Dr Ismail Redwan told a press conference in Gaza city that ‘all resistance options’ were open before the Palestinian factions to confront and repel the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip.
Israeli tanks had earlier surrounded a mosque where Palestinian fighters were seeking refuge, when several hundred heavily-veiled women swarmed through their lines towards the al-Nasir mosque to rescue about 60 men besieged inside.
Soldiers fired into the crowd and two women were shot and killed as the fighters escaped in the confusion. Six others were wounded.
Palestinian Legislative Council member Mustafa Barghouti said Israel must stop its attacks on civilians in Gaza.
‘They killed two women but not only that, they killed 25 people most of whom are civilians,’ he said.
‘By which justification the Israeli Army has to seize a whole city, a whole town with its tanks, with its F-16 jet fighters, attacking a civilian area that has no army, that has nothing to defend itself with?’
The dramatic events came on the third day of an Israeli assault on the Gaza town of Beit Hanoun, the largest operation Israel has conducted in the Gaza Strip in months.
Israeli forces opened fire towards the women and two of them were killed.
Um Muhammad, a woman in her 40s, said after the rescue attempt: ‘We risked our lives to free our sons.’
A doctor said one woman and two men were killed outright at the pre-rescue demonstration, before a second woman initially pronounced ‘clinically dead’ from Israeli gunfire also passed away.
Some 400 people, around half of them women, had protested at the western entrance to Beit Hanoun well within sight of Israeli armoured vehicles.
Two Israeli helicopters fired off sporadic salvos of gunfire in a bid to disperse the crowd as Israeli ground fire boomed out across Beit Hanoun.
A Palestinian journalist working for the local Ramattan news agency was seriously wounded by Israeli fire as he filmed the protest, a medic said.
Affirming that the Israeli forces’ crimes in Beit Hanoun would not pass without appropriate punishment, Hamas spokesman Dr Redwan held the Israeli government fully responsible for any retaliatory strikes to such bloody aggressions.
He also asked the Palestinian National Authority security apparatuses under the command of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, to contribute alongside the resistance factions in confronting the Israeli military’s invasion in Beit Hanoun.
Redwan stressed: ‘We affirm to the Zionist society that the massacres perpetrated by your army against our people will only lead to more resistance attacks, which are natural retaliatory strikes to such carnages.’
He urged the Arab and Muslim masses to hit the streets in massive protest marches against the Israeli ‘war of annihilation’ against the Palestinian people, and asked the world media to expose the Israeli military’s savagery.
The spokesman appealed to the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, to act and bridle the Israeli forces’ atrocities and to remind the UN members with their duties towards such violations of international agreements that stipulate protection of civilians at times of war.
For his part, Fawzi Barhum, another Hamas spokesman in Gaza, said that the massacre in Beit Hanoun was a clear message to those local parties calling for recognising Israel.
He urged the Red Cross and human rights organisations to immediately intervene to end the siege laid to Beit Hanoun and to save the civilians there from the brutality of the ‘Zionist war machine’.
Barhum called for the urgent convening of an emergency Arab summit to discuss the Israeli troops’ bloody incursion into Beit Hanoun that had been ongoing for three days and claimed the lives of 25 Palestinians and wounded more than 200 others many of whom are in critical conditions.
He criticised the unjustified Arab and Islamic silence vis-à-vis those massacres that did not spare children or women, and asserted that the Palestinian people were not only defending themselves but also the entire Arab and Muslim world.
Barhum charged: ‘The Palestinian people are in great danger and Beit Hanoun is in danger and the Arabs are watching silently.’
The Hamas spokesman held the US and the EU responsible for such pogroms due to their silence and encouragement to the Jewish state.
The Israeli army later confirmed that the Palestinian men had escaped from the mosque.
Shortly after they fled, the roof of the building, one of the oldest in Gaza according to locals, collapsed, witnesses and the Israeli army said.
The minaret was left standing, but most of the building was reduced to rubble.
The Israeli military, which earlier demolished a wall of the mosque compound and fired stun grenades and tear gas inside, said the collapse was the result of gunfire and damage done during the 12-hour siege.
At a Hamas rally after nightfall on Thursday in Gaza City, Palestinian prime minister Haniya called the Israeli offensive ‘terrorism’.
Haniya affirmed that the steadfast northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Hanoun will never surrender to the Israeli invaders despite the brutal murder and destruction and their troops’ use of tanks and warplanes against the unarmed inhabitants.
The aggression on Beit Hanoun followed Israel’s failure to bring about the fall of the Hamas-led government through economic and political means and it was now trying the military option, he said, adding that Israel will not achieve its goal.
Addressing thousands of Palestinians who hit the streets of Gaza city on Saturday night to protest against the ongoing massacre in Beit Hanoun, Haniya said that his government held an emergency session and directed urgent messages to the concerned parties demanding their intervention to halt the barbaric Israeli siege and trail of murder and destruction in Beit Hanoun.
Participants in the huge rally demanded retaliation for the Israeli bloody crimes in Beit Hanoun and asked the international community to break its silence and to rein in the Israeli aggression.
Israel’s offensive, called Operation Autumn Clouds, began on Wednesday on the pretext of halting the barrage of rockets into Israeli territory.
Despite the Israeli assault, Palestinian fighters still managed to fire six homemade missiles at the Israeli border town of Sderot on Thursday, wounding at least two people, medical officials said.
Before dawn on Friday, four members of Hamas’s armed Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades were killed in a pre-dawn air strike in eastern Gaza City.
The strike, one of four overnight aerial attacks against what the Israeli military called ‘terror cells’ in the Gaza Strip, earned a revenge call from Hamas.
‘We will respond vigorously to these assassinations of the sons of Hamas.
‘These assassinations will only make our resistance stronger,’ threatened Brigades spokesman Abu Obeida.
A fifth Hamas member, a bodyguard to refugees minister Atef Edwane, was shot dead in Beit Hanoun.
In the West Bank on Friday, Palestinian public works and housing minister, 46-year-old Abdelrahman Zidane, was arrested by troops at dawn from his home in the occupied territory’s political capital Ramallah, Palestinian security sources said.
An Israeli army spokeswoman said only that a ‘Hamas terrorist in Ramallah’ had been arrested, without providing any further details.
An elderly Palestinian woman was killed in Bethlehem during an Israeli army arrest raid, and at least one Palestinian youth died during an Israeli operation in Nablus.
