Migrant Worker Lightly Hurt as Qassams Pound Negev

by Haaretz Service and Reuters
Haaretz
June 9, 2008

http://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/199/migrant-worker-lightly-hurt-as-qassams-pound-negev

Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip on Sunday fired a barrage of Qassam rockets toward the western Negev, which exploded in open fields in the Eshkol region. A migrant worker was lightly hurt by shrapnel in one of the blasts.

Later Sunday, Israel Defense Forces troops discovered three Qassam launchers in south Gaza, which were apparently used to launch the rockets that wounded the worker earlier in the day.

Eshkol-region farmers expressed concern last week that their workers would leave the area, after a rocket attack on a poultry coop in Moshav Ami Oz near Moshav Yesha injured two migrant workers from Thailand.

"If the workers leave, agriculture in the area will collapse," said the chairman of the agricultural committee in the Eshkol Regional Council, Mordi Biton. Biton added that Israelis will not come to work in the area because of the security situation.

Over the weekend, 12 mortar shells and four Qassam rockets were fired at the Negev. The shells, fired on Saturday, caused no damages or injuries. One of the rockets fired on Friday exploded in the parking lot of the Sapir College in Sderot, damaging some vehicles.

Also on Sunday, Border police troops arrested a Palestinian teenager at the Hawara checkpoint, near Nablus, after catching him in possession of six pipe bombs.

The troops discovered the home-made explosives in a bag carried by the teen during a routine check. They also found a magazine for rifle ammunition.

The youth was then taken for questioning by Shin Bet security service.

On Thursday, 51-year-old Amnon Rosenver was killed when a mortar shell exploded at the factory where he was working in Kibbutz Nir Oz.

Hamas militant killed, another wounded by IDF fire in Gaza

Shells fired from an IDF tank killed a Palestinian gunman and wounded another east of Gaza City late Saturday, Hamas Islamists and local medical workers said.

Residents of the neighbourhood of Shijaia, a Hamas stronghold, said a shell hit a house where the gunman was killed and another shell was aimed directly at a gunman who was critically wounded.

Hamas said the two men belonged to their organization.

An IDF spokesman said, however, that a ground force operating on the Israeli side of the border in the northern part of the Gaza Strip spotted an armed man trying to lay an explosive device near the fence and shot him.

Israel has tightened a blockade on the Gaza Strip and often conducts raids and air strikes into the territory in an effort to end frequent rocket and mortar fire at towns and agricultural communities close to the border.

On Friday, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said a major military operation into the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip to counter the cross-border rocket fire was looking more likely.

"At this moment the pendulum is swinging closer to military action in Gaza than anything else," Olmert said after returning from a three-day trip to the United States where he met President George W. Bush.

But defense sources said over the weekend that a big invasion is less certain and imminent than as it is painted to be in the media.

Hamas seized the Gaza Strip from the forces of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah faction a year ago in a brief but bloody coup.

Violence along the Gaza border has marred peace talks between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Abbas, who holds sway in the West Bank. Egypt has so far failed in efforts to broker a truce to curb the rocket attacks on Israel and Israeli raids in the Gaza Strip.

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