Oct 29, 2007, 9:54 GMT
Tel Aviv - Israel threatened Monday to severe its economic and infrastructural ties with the Gaza Strip if rocket attacks from the area at its southern towns and villages continued.
Further tightening its closure of the Strip, it also closed one of two Israel-Gaza border crossings that had remained open during the past months for the passage of humanitarian aid, Sufa in the south east of Khan Younis.
The only outlet now remaining open to humanitarian aid is is the southern-most Kerem Shalom crossing, a military spokeswoman said.
Implementing a new sanction against the near-daily rocket fire, Israel this week began reducing its weekly supply of petrol by 15 per cent and of diesel by 13 per cent.
It also wants to cut electricity by 1 per cent - or 15 minutes each day - to those areas in the Strip from where the rockets are fired, but this move is pending a review by Israel's attorney-general Monday, a defence ministry spokesman said.
The electricity cut would have little impact and was meant mainly as a 'signal' to the radical Islamic Hamas movement ruling the Strip, said Shlomo Dror, a spokesman for the defence ministry body charged with coordinating government policy with the military.
'We are sending a signal to the Palestinians. We tell them that the tendency is to go to a disengagement,' he told Deutsche Presse- Agentur dpa.
'Israel won't keep supplying all that they want, when they fire Qassams at us. So Israel is saying, this equation mustn't exist.
If Hamas Gaza chose to continue supporting the rocket attacks, rather than to stop them, 'it will have to begin thinking how to bring in fuel, maybe through Egypt, and how to establish its own powerplant,' he warned.
European Commissioner for External Relations Benita Ferrero-Walner said Monday she was 'concerned' by the move and planned to raise the issue in talks with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in Jerusalem later in the day.
Meeting Israeli President Shimon Peres, she warned against 'collective punishment' of Gaza's civilian population for the rocket attacks.
Israeli soldiers, meanwhile, shot dead a Hamas militant in an armed clash near the Sufa crossing, and another Hamas militant and a 44-year-old civilian said to be handicapped in clashes near the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun.
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