A rocket fired by Palestinian militants killed a 75-year-old Israeli woman on Monday, just as an Egyptian mediator was winding up truce talks in Israel -- underlining both the urgency and complexity of working out a ceasefire between Israel and the Hamas rulers of Gaza.
The deadly rocket hit a house in the village of Yesha, about 6km from Gaza. As recently as Friday, a fatal rocket attack unleashed Israeli reprisals that left five Palestinians dead in Gaza airstrikes.
Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the deadly attack. On Monday morning, Islamic Jihad fired two Grad rockets at the southern city of Ashkelon. No one was hurt.
Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev denounced the attack but did not say it would halt the truce talks.
"The rocket fire into Israel will end, it will end either because calm will be achieved, or Israel will act to protect its people," he said.
The talks by mediator Omar Suleiman, Egypt's powerful intelligence chief, produced no tangible results on Monday, even before the rocket blasted the house in southern Israel.
Suleiman brought the results of months of talks with the Hamas rulers of Gaza and many smaller militant groups to Israeli leaders for their comments. The outline of the deal would be a six-month truce, stopping the Palestinian rocket and mortar fire and Israeli reprisals. Also, Israel would ease the punishing blockade it imposed after Hamas took power in a violent sweep through Gaza last June.
Israeli officials did not reject the elements of the package, but Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert insisted on freedom for a soldier, Corporal Gilad Schalit, captured in a cross-border raid in June 2006, and others demanded an end to smuggling of arms from Egypt.
The Philippines yesterday said its coast guard would acquire 40 fast patrol craft from France, with plans to deploy some of them in disputed areas of the South China Sea. The deal is the “largest so far single purchase” in Manila’s ongoing effort to modernize its coast guard, with deliveries set to start in four years, Philippine Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Ronnie Gil Gavan told a news conference. He declined to provide specifications for the vessels, which Manila said would cost 25.8 billion pesos (US$440 million), to be funded by development aid from the French government. He said some of the vessels would
CARGO PLANE VECTOR: Officials said they believe that attacks involving incendiary devices on planes was the work of Russia’s military intelligence agency the GRU Western security officials suspect Russian intelligence was behind a plot to put incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes headed to North America, including one that caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another that ignited in a warehouse in England. Poland last month said that it had arrested four people suspected to be linked to a foreign intelligence operation that carried out sabotage and was searching for two others. Lithuania’s prosecutor general Nida Grunskiene on Tuesday said that there were an unspecified number of people detained in several countries, offering no elaboration. The events come as Western officials say
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered
Former US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi said if US President Joe Biden had ended his re-election bid sooner, the Democratic Party could have held a competitive nominating process to choose his replacement. “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said in an interview on Thursday published by the New York Times the next day. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” she said. Pelosi said she thought the Democratic candidate, US Vice President Kamala Harris, “would have done
RSS