GAZA CITY: Israel and Gaza’s Hamas rulers rattled sabres on Sunday after fighters fired rockets into southern Israel, prompting a series of retaliatory air raids.
Israeli warplanes launched two pre-dawn raids on tunnels in the southern Gaza Strip on Sunday after a Palestinian rocket struck the southern town of Sderot, damaging a university building without causing casualties.
Also over the weekend, Gaza fighters fired a rare military-grade rocket into the southern Israeli port city of Ashkelon, damaging parked cars and shattering the windows of an apartment block without wounding anyone.
That incident also prompted several Israeli air strikes late on Friday, one of which killed a senior Hamas military commander and wounded another eight people, drawing threats of revenge from the Islamists.
Hamas on Sunday linked the flare-up of violence to Arab foreign ministers’ support for the principle of direct talks with Israel, saying Palestinians were "paying the price for (their) great error."
A spokesman for the Israeli military said Sunday’s strikes targeted two tunnels used to smuggle arms into the Islamist Hamas-run enclave.
Palestinian medics said one person had been lightly injured in the raids.
Israeli cabinet minister Benjamin Ben Eliezer told army radio that the military was "not going to sit there with its arms crossed in the face of these attacks," but that its response would be measured.
"We do not want to set off an escalation because that is exactly what Hamas wants, which is why our response is hard but limited," he said.
Speaking at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he held the Islamist movement "directly responsible" for the attacks.
"Israel reserves the right to defend its citizens, and we shall continue to take all steps necessary to defend the state of Israel," he said.
Hamas, meanwhile, condemned the "Israeli aggression" and reiterated its opposition to the relaunch of direct peace talks between the Western-backed Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas and Israel.
Arab foreign ministers meeting in Cairo last week said they would support direct negotiations if and when Abbas agreed to them, as international pressure mounted on the Palestinians to return to face-to-face talks.
Israeli President Shimon Peres meanwhile was in Egypt on Sunday to discuss peace efforts with President Hosni Mubarak.
"Our people in Gaza are paying the price for the great error and political mistake committed by the Arab Peace Initiative follow-up committee against the Palestinian people," Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhum said.
He also criticised a letter from US President Barack Obama warning that Abbas’s failure to return to direct talks could harm US-Palestinian relations.
Palestinian officials had revealed the contents of the letter on Saturday.
"The letter from Obama to Abbas revealed the falsehood of Obama’s policies and disappointed the Palestinian people. It deliberately harms the interests of our people in favour of those of the Zionist enemy and America."
Hamas, which is blacklisted as a terrorist group by Israel, the United States and the European Union, is pledged to Israel’s destruction and has adamantly opposed peace talks since they began in the early 1990s.
The Islamist movement has ruled Gaza since it drove out forces loyal to Abbas in June 2007, splitting the Palestinians into hostile rival camps.
