Attacks by Hamas break Gaza truce

A Hamas sniper in the Gaza Strip wounded an electric company worker on the Israeli side of the border Monday in the Islamic movement’s first acknowledged breach of a 4-month-old truce with Israel.

The shooting embarrassed the Palestinian Authority’s new Hamas-led coalition government as it lobbied for international recognition and aid. Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh was meeting at the time in Gaza City with a senior official from Norway.

In claiming responsibility for the attack, a spokesman for Hamas’ military wing cited Haniyeh’s televised reading Saturday of a point in the new government’s program asserting the Palestinians’ right to use “resistance in all its forms” against the Jewish state.

The spokesman, Abu Obeida of the Izzidin al-Qassam, called the shooting “a response to continued Zionist aggression” against Palestinian fighters in the West Bank. He said the group sent two mortar rounds over the border Monday in a separate attack but missed the target, a group of Israeli soldiers.

Israel called the attacks evidence that the new alliance between Hamas and the more moderate Fatah movement was flouting international demands that the coalition recognize Israel, renounce violence and accept past peace accords with the Jewish state.

“Haniyeh’s followers have turned his words into actions,” said Israeli government spokeswoman Miri Eisin.

Israeli leaders have refused to deal with the Palestinian government, which was sworn in Saturday under a power-sharing accord. On Sunday, the Israeli Cabinet decided that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s U.S.-brokered negotiations with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, the Fatah leader, would continue but would be limited to shared security and humanitarian concerns, ruling out a formal peace process for now.

Meanwhile, Israel is pressing Western nations to maintain a boycott imposed on the Palestinian Authority after Hamas won parliamentary elections in January last year and gained complete control of the Cabinet. The U.S. and the European Union consider Hamas a terrorist organization.

The quartet of Middle East mediators -- the U.S., the EU, the United Nations and Russia -- consulted by conference call Monday and agreed to maintain its embargo on direct aid to the Palestinian government, U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said.

But Norway, which is not an EU member, has pledged to resume economic aid, and EU members including France and Belgium plan to meet with representatives of the new government.

At a Washington news conference, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana said, “We expect very much that this government ... will be taking the positions of the quartet as much as possible and in the end completely, [we] will have a total normalization of relations,” Reuters news agency reported.

U.S. officials, in a break with Israel, have not ruled out meeting with non-Hamas Cabinet officials.

Monday’s shooting targeted electric company workers preparing to install high-voltage towers at a gas terminal near the Karni crossing, the main transit point for cargo between Israel and Gaza. Kobi Ohayon, 42, was hospitalized with a bullet wound to the groin.

Palestinian government officials distanced themselves from the attack.

“We do realize that some actions undermine the duty of the government to release the people from the siege they are suffering,” said Mustafa Barghouti, the politically independent information minister. But he added, “If the Israeli government responds to our calls for calm, then all these things will stop.”

Israel has rebuffed the new government’s appeal to extend the cease-fire to the West Bank. Israeli officials have insisted on full compliance first with the truce in Gaza.

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boudreaux@latimes.com

Times staff writer Paul Richter in Washington and special correspondents Maher Abukhater in Ramallah, West Bank, and Rushdi abu Alouf in Gaza City contributed to this report.