Israeli soldiers wound female farmer in Gaza (1st Lead)

Jul 1, 2008, 9:11 GMT

Gaza/Tel Aviv - Israeli soldiers stationed on the southern border of the Gaza Strip shot and injured a female Palestinian farmer early Tuesday, while Palestinian militants overnight launched another rocket into southern Israel, further threatening a wobbly, 12-day-old truce.

Palestinian medical officials said the woman was shot in the lower limbs when she entered her land near the southern Gaza Strip border with Israel, east of Khan Younis.

The border area shooting is the third such incident reported by Palestinians, who have said a Palestinian farmer in his 70s was also shot in the lower limbs Wednesday last week in the same area, near southern Gaza's border with Israel. A third Palestinian farmer was shot and wounded by Israeli soldiers stationed on Gaza's north- western border with Israel on Monday last week.

An Israeli military spokesman said the army was checking the report of the wounded woman. Of the other two cases, he could only confirm the shooting of Wednesday last week, but he insisted that the soldiers had fired only warning shots after they spotted three Palestinians approaching the border fence. The soldiers did not 'in any way' aim at the elderly man's body and fired only into the air. They identified no hit, he told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

Israel has via Egypt informed the radical Islamic Hamas movement ruling Gaza that it will fire warning shots at any Palestinian entered a 'no-go' security zone near Gaza's border fence, security officials confirmed to dpa.

The officials said the decision came after militants had launched 'not one, not two,' but numerous attacks on soldiers guarding the border.

Many Palestinian farmers, however, have land adjacent to the border, which they need to cultivate, and enter the area regardless of the warning.

Hamas has expressed objection to the Israeli decision to declare the area immediately west of Gaza's security fence a 'no-go' security strip and the move was expected to create tension.

The Israeli Ha'aretz daily reported Tuesday that Israel wants to keep the 'no-go' security zones along Gaza's border because it fears that militants will use the truce to plant explosives on the Palestinian side of the fence, which would give them an edge if the ceasefire collapses or when it expires. In the past, militants have planted bombs aimed at Israeli military vehicles patrolling the area.

According to Ha'aretz, Israel also fears that Hamas might build a line of fortifications along the fence as a basis for further attacks, as the Lebanese Hezbollah movement did between Israel's unilateral withdrawal from a self-proclaimed 'security zone' in southern Lebanon in May 2000 and the second Lebanon war in the summer of 2006.

Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak, meanwhile, ordered the military to again shut Israel's key crossings with Gaza, allowing in no goods until further notice, in retaliation for an overnight rocket attack from the Strip.

The rocket launched late Monday caused neither injuries nor damage, a military spokeswoman in Tel Aviv said, and was the fifth launched since the truce went into effect at 0300 GMT on June 19.

Israel responded also to the previous launchings by temporarily shutting the Gaza crossing points. They had just been reopened Sunday after some four days of complete closure.

No organization claimed responsibility for Monday night's rocket attack, after Hamas had threatened to take steps against other militant factions in Gaza violating the truce.

The Iranian-backed Islamic Jihad movement had claimed credit for all but one of the previous rockets fired since the truce.

It has said it wants Israel to expand the ceasefire to the West Bank and fired the rockets after Israeli soldiers killed a senior Islamic Jihad militant and his companion during an arrest raid in the northern West Bank city of Nablus last week.

The ceasefire in Gaza, brokered by Egypt, took effect after months of difficult indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas, and of near-daily rocket attacks from the Strip and Israeli retaliatory military incursions.