CAIRO: Israel conducted an air strike in the early hours of Monday against purported tunnels running beneath the border on the Palestinian side of the town of Rafah through which the border permeates. The flare-up came as President Hosni Mubarak held talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas amid efforts by Cairo to broker a lasting truce in and around Gaza.
One Palestinian was killed and four others wounded in the strike on a vehicle carrying insurgents in the southern town of Rafah, medical sources and witnesses said.
The dead man was identified as Ayman Abu Jazar of the Popular Resistance Committees, a small Palestinian armed group, AFP reported.
Meanwhile the Hamas rulers spoke out in favor of a conditional one-year truce on condition the impoverished territory s crossings are opened to the outside world.
We agree in principle with a one-year truce, spokesman Fawzi Barhum told AFP, but added that Hamas has not ruled out an 18-month truce proposed by the Egyptian mediators.
Whether one year or a year and a half, it must be linked to the opening of all crossing points, including [the] Rafah [crossing on the Egyptian border], and the lifting of the [Israeli] blockade, he said.
The ceasefire talks have been complicated by Palestinian factional feuding.
On Sunday, Abbas accused Hamas – which kicked his forces out of Gaza in June 2007 – of putting Palestinian lives and their hopes for statehood at risk.
He also accused Hamas of trying to smash the Palestine Liberation Organization and said he rejected talks with any group which did not recognize the PLO
Khaled Meshaal, who heads Hamas s Damascus-based exiled political leadership, said last week that the PLO had become obsolete and called for a new national authority.
His comments were not supported by other militant groups allied with Hamas, who said the PLO should be reformed rather than replaced.
Sources in Rafah told Daily News Egypt that no damage occurred to the Egyptian side of the border as the strikes were aimed at the entryways of the tunnels on the Palestinian side of Rafah.
The Israeli military claimed that six tunnels had been targeted in the latest air strike, the second offensive in two days on the town of Rafah.
Concerning the tunnels, AP reported that US army engineers had arrived in Rafah to help install American radar equipment to help locate the tunnels which are used for smuggling essential goods as well as weapons into the Gaza Strip.
Four US engineers accompanied four army trucks inside the Rafah border crossing on Sunday. Israel and the US had signed a security memorandum in the final days of the previous American administration specifically on enhancing border security between Egypt and Gaza.
Meanwhile, former leader of the banned Labor party and former editor of Al Shaab newspaper Magdi Ahmed Hussain was still detained in the Rafah police station for the third day running according to activists in the area.
Hussain was arrested Saturday when he arrived at the Rafah border crossing after spending two weeks in Gaza. Authorities claim that he had entered Gaza illegally through one of the border tunnels. His party claims he had entered through an opening in the border wall.
Rights activists told Daily News Egypt that Hussain was to be referred to the military police in Al-Arish but that orders had not come through yet for the transfer to occur. They added that authorities in Al-Arish were waiting on orders from Cairo over how to proceed. -Additional reporting by AFP
