Israeli missile kills Jihad official, boy

By Ibrahim Barzak
The Associated Press

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GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — An Israeli helicopter fired a missile into a car traveling in a crowded Gaza City street yesterday, killing Aziz Mahmoud Shami, a leader of the militant Islamic Jihad group, and a 12-year-old boy on his way to school.

The attack wounded 10 Palestinians, three of them critically, in Israel's first targeted killing in six weeks, doctors said.

Later in the day, Israeli forces fired at two men running toward a fence that separates between Jewish settlements and Palestinian areas of the Gaza Strip, the army said. Palestinian security forces said one of the men, an Islamic Jihad militant, was killed and another escaped.

Early today, Israeli forces shot and killed a fugitive as he tried to escape during a raid in the Rafah refugee camp along the Egypt-Gaza border, seeking to arrest a fugitive, the army said.

The Israeli military said Shami, leader of Islamic Jihad's military wing in Gaza City, was preparing for "a major attack" on the Gaza Strip settlement of Netzarim.

The army also said he was behind a 1995 double-suicide bombing near the coastal city of Netanya that killed 21 Israelis, all but one of them soldiers, and a more recent infiltration into a Gaza Strip military base in which three soldiers were killed.

He is a cousin of the group's overall leader, Abdullah Shami.

The attack also killed Tarek Sousi, who was on his way to school, doctors said.

Israel's military has routinely sent helicopters and F-16 jets to kill Palestinian militants in targeted missile attacks throughout more than three years of fighting.
 
Also yesterday, a Palestinian military court charged four suspects with planting the explosives that ripped apart a U.S. diplomatic vehicle and killed three American security guards Oct. 15 along a main road in Gaza.

U.S. officials have been pressing the Palestinians to find those responsible and have repeatedly said they are disappointed with the level of cooperation by Palestinian police.

Recently U.S. officials have warned that some U.S. aid programs could be scaled back or canceled if there is no progress in the probe.

A military prosecutor said the bombs were intended to target Israeli tanks entering the Strip, but one of the explosives may have ripped apart the U.S. car.

U.S. investigators say they have found evidence indicating that the bomb was detonated by someone who intentionally targeted the U.S. convoy after watching it pass from a nearby hiding place.

In another development, nearly 400 members of Yasser Arafat's ruling Fatah Party resigned yesterday to protest what they call corruption and bad leadership within the group.

The mass resignation is the latest example of long-standing friction between younger members of the Palestinians' main political force and the old guard that accompanied Arafat back to the West Bank and Gaza Strip from exile in the early 1990s. The 400 ex-Fatah members were from the party's lower ranks.

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