TRUCE BROKEN Rockets From Gaza Hit Israel

By Joel Greenberg, Tuesday, February 26, 9:56 AM

JERUSALEM — Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday fired a rocket into Israel for the first time since a cease-fire reached three months ago ended an Israeli offensive against the militant Islamist group Hamas, police said.

Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the armed wing of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction, claimed responsibility. It called the firing a response to Saturday’s death in custody of a Palestinian who was being interrogated by Israel’s Shin Bet security agency.

A Grad rocket landed on a road outside the southern city of Ashkelon, causing damage but no casualties, said Micky Rosenfeld, an Israeli police spokesman. The attack was the first since rockets were fired deep into Israel in November during an eight-day Israeli military campaign to halt such attacks from the Gaza Strip.

The Israeli army said that in response to Tuesday’s attack, the Kerem Shalom border crossing, through which goods are shipped from Israel to the Gaza Strip, would be closed. In addition, the severely limited movement of people out of Gaza through the Erez border crossing would be further restricted and permitted only to medical patients traveling to Israel for treatment or other “exceptional cases,” the military said.

The death of the Palestinian prisoner, Arafat Jaradat, has heightened tensions in the West Bank after days of street protests in support of four other Palestinian inmates, who are on extended hunger strikes. Preliminary findings of an Israeli autopsy did not determine a cause of death, but a Palestinian forensic pathologist who attended the examination said it showed that Jaradat had been tortured.

In a statement sent to reporters, al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades said the rocket attack was a response to the “assassination” of Jaradat and vowed to “resist our enemy with all means at our disposal.”

A spokesman in Gaza said the group had carried out the attack, which followed a written warning of retaliation distributed at Jaradat’s funeral at his home town in the West Bank on Monday.

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Last Edited by SPUD on 02/26/2013 06:15 PM