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Thursday, March 27, 2008       Free Headline Alerts

Hamas fires 20 rockets into Israel in 2 days

TEL AVIV — The Hamas regime has intensified rocket strikes from the Gaza Strip into Israel.

On Wednesday and Thursday, Palestiniangunners fired more than 20 Kassam-class, short-range missiles into Israeli communities, injuring two.

"The rockets out of Gaza have not stopped," Israeli envoy to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman, said. "Hamas is using this time to smuggle and produce more rockets."

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Six of the missiles landed in the southern Israeli city of Sderot, the prime target of Palestinian gunners since 2002. At least two Israelis were injured.

Israel has significantly reduced operations in the Gaza Strip amid an Egyptian and U.S. effort to achieve a ceasefire. For several days in March, Palestinian gunners reduced their fire amid orders from the Hamas regime.

But officials said Hamas has refused to halt increasing missile fire from its Palestinian allies. They cited the Iranian-sponsored Islamic Jihad, which resumed daily missile and sniper attacks on Israeli civilian targets.

In an unrelated development, the Israeli military announced the arrest of the Palestinian planner of a suicide bombing that killed 30 Israelis and injured 150 in 2002. The target of Hamas operative Omar Jabar, arrested near the West Bank city of Tulkarm, was a Passover ritual meal at an Israeli hotel. The suicide strike sparked a month-long Israeli military operation that recaptured the West Bank.

"Jabar recruited the contact that dispatched the suicide bomber, introducing him to the head of the Hamas in Tulkarm at the time, Abed Sayad.," the military said on Wednesday. "Sayad admitted in his investigation that the connection with Jabar had already begun in 1994, when the two were imprisoned together."

Since the attack, Jabar was said to have recruited and trained operatives for Hamas in the West Bank. The military said Jabar was directed to establish a Hamas militia in Tulkarm capable of fighting the Palestinian Authority.

"Following clashes between Hamas and Fatah in the Gaza Strip in January 2007, Jabar worked to establish and finance a Hamas operational cell in Tulkarm," the military said. "He purchased weapons and recruited terror operatives, intended for the establishment of a Hamas cell similar to operational cells active in Gaza."



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