Israel vows retaliation for Gaza rocket fire
Outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert vowed yesterday to hit back "severely" if militants in the Islamist Hamas-run Gaza Strip continue to fire rockets into Israel.
"If the rocket fire from Gaza continues, we will hit back severely, so much so that the terrorist organisations will understand that Israel is not ready to resign itself to this," Olmert said at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting.
"At the end of the week, 11 rockets were fired against southern Israel," he said. "Defence Minister Ehud Barak will give directions so that Israeli forces bring calm to southern Israel."
He spoke a day after seven rockets fired from Gaza landed in Israel without causing casualties although one smashed into an empty school, and a day before an international conference on rebuilding Gaza is to be held in Egypt.
President Shimon Peres told visiting Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere that the billions of dollars expected to be pledged to the Palestinians for rebuilding Gaza by world powers at the Egyptian conference should be given to the Western-backed Palestinian Authority, not Hamas.
Peres "detailed how the smuggling of weapons from Iran into the Gaza Strip has been renewed, and he requested that Europe emphasise that money for the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip be directed to the Palestinian Authority and the bodies of the United Nations in order to best help improve the lives of Palestinian citizens," said a statement from his office.
"President Peres cautioned that in the past, a great deal of European money has been wasted in vain and diverted to supporting Palestinian terror activities," it said.
Hamas, which has run Gaza since it ousted forces loyal to president Mahmud Abbas in June 2007, is blacklisted by Israel and the West as a "terror" organisation.
Both Israel and Hamas have violated the tenuous ceasefires that the two sides declared on January 18 to end a 22-day war in the coastal strip that left more than 1,300 Palestinians and 13 Israelis dead.
Egypt has been mediating in a bid to turn the shaky ceasefires into a lasting truce.
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