Hamas, Abbas Decry Israeli Steps

Hamas and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas joined Monday in bitter criticism of Israel for moving to cut ties with the new Palestinian government.

At the same time, a senior aide to acting Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said the incoming Israeli government would speed up its timetable for uprooting remote Jewish settlements in the West Bank, in effect seeking to draw Israel’s borders by 2008.

The Israeli military, meanwhile, kept up a steady barrage of artillery fire on the northern Gaza Strip. Palestinian officials said an 8-year-old girl was killed and her pregnant mother critically injured when a shell landed on their house.

The military said its strikes were meant to quell rocket fire aimed at Israel by Palestinian militants. An army spokeswoman confirmed that a strike targeted the northern Gazan village of Beit Lahiya after a volley of homemade rockets was fired from the area, and said the military regretted any civilian deaths or injuries.

Intensifying the volatile atmosphere in Gaza, thousands of demonstrators took to the streets to protest a temporary hiatus in direct U.S. and European Union aid to the Hamas-led Palestinian government, which was sworn in two weeks ago.

In recent weeks, Israeli officials have been taking steps to sharply curtail ties with the Palestinian government because Hamas, the Islamist group that swept to victory in Jan. 25 parliamentary elections, does not recognize Israel’s right to exist.

The latest of those measures came Monday, when the Israeli military formally ended its cooperation with Palestinian security forces by closing down a liaison office in the West Bank town of Jericho.

A day earlier, Olmert’s most senior aides approved a plan for severing most links with the Palestinian government. That proposal, which still needs the endorsement of the full Israeli Cabinet, would allow continued contact with Abbas, who is considered a moderate, but aims to isolate Hamas.

Abbas and Hamas officials, who disagree on many policy matters including the Islamist group’s stance toward Israel, separately and vehemently condemned the Israeli moves.

“Decisions of the Israeli government to isolate and harm us ... are in total contradiction to agreements we signed with them,” Abbas said in a speech at a children’s event in the West Bank town of Ramallah. “We loudly raise our voice in protest.”

Hamas spokesman Sami abu Zuhri, in a statement issued in Gaza, called the Israeli steps “a declaration of war and a failed effort to sow internal disputes among Palestinians.”

Israel has said it will continue to strike militant groups if the Palestinian government cannot halt their rocket attacks. Israel has stepped up its airstrikes and artillery fire in Gaza, from which it withdrew troops and Jewish settlers last summer.

Palestinians and human rights groups have denounced the artillery fire, directed at a swath of northern Gaza commonly used as a launching ground for rocket attacks, as an unacceptable risk to Gaza’s civilian population.

Palestinian medical officials identified the child killed in Monday’s shelling as 8-year-old Hadil Ghabin. At least eight other family members were wounded, several of them children, according to doctors.

The growing enmity between the two sides makes it highly unlikely that the Hamas-led Palestinian administration and the Israeli government being formed by Olmert will engage in negotiations anytime in the near future.

Olmert has indicated that in the absence of a Palestinian negotiating partner, he would seek to unilaterally draw Israel’s borders. Previously he had said he hoped to “converge” scattered West Bank settlements into several large blocks by 2010.

However, Olmert’s designated chief of staff, Yoram Turbowicz, was quoted Monday as saying Olmert hoped to complete a withdrawal from much of the West Bank before 2008, while President Bush was still in office.

“We have a very tight timetable, because we seek the support of the U.S. administration and President Bush,” Turbowicz told the Yediot Aharonot newspaper. “It has to be done by November 2008.”

Special correspondent Fayed abu Shammalah in Gaza City contributed to this report.