Palestinian shelling kills Israeli woman in Gaza settlement

By The Associated Press and Reuters

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The attack, which came just hours before the start of the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, was likely to mobilize further opposition to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip next year.

The militant Hamas group claimed responsibility for firing two mortars at the Neve Dekalim settlement in southern Gaza.

A Hamas video showed three masked militants setting up and firing a mortar. After the shell was fired, heavy gunfire could be heard — apparently the Israeli return fire at the nearby Palestinian town of Khan Younis.

One of the Hamas mortars hit a house in Neve Dekalim, wounding two women. One, identified as Tiferet Tratner, died of her wounds, and the second was slightly hurt. Eran Sternberg, a settler spokesman in Gaza, said Tratner also held U.S. citizenship.

Palestinians have fired hundreds of crude mortars and rockets at Jewish settlements in Gaza and Israeli border towns since 2000, but yesterday's attack marked the first time a resident of a Gaza settlement was killed. In June, two Israelis were killed in a rocket attack on the Israel town of Sderot.

Eli Moses, a resident of Neve Dekalim, said Sharon is to blame because of his plan to withdraw Israeli troops and settlers from Gaza. "We want to emphasize that the prime minister is directly responsible for the death," Moses told Israel Radio. "Whoever fired the mortar is of course responsible, but there's a person above him, and unfortunately that's the prime minister."

Neve Dekalim is one of 21 Gaza settlements, with a total of 8,200 residents, to be dismantled under Sharon's "unilateral disengagement" plan. Sharon said evacuating the Gaza settlements and four isolated West Bank enclaves is a way of strengthening Israel's hold on parts of the West Bank, where most of its 236,000 settlers live.

The shelling came a day after Palestinians killed three Israeli soldiers in southern Gaza. After a protracted gunbattle, the three attackers were killed by the army.

Israel usually retaliates for such attacks, and this morning fired a missile into the nearby Khan Younis refugee camp. The Palestinians said a 60-year-old man was killed.

At the United Nations yesterday, a U.N. human-rights investigator said Israel is building its barrier on West Bank land not to keep out suicide bombers but to confiscate the land and put pressure on Palestinians to move away.
 
"There is no compelling evidence that suicide bombers could not have been as effectively prevented from entering Israel if the wall had been built along the Green Line — the accepted border between Israel and Palestine — or within the Israeli side of the Green Line," John Dugard said in a report to the U.N. General Assembly.

"The course of the wall clearly indicates that its purpose is to incorporate as many settlers as possible into Israel," said Dugard, a South African law professor charged with monitoring the Palestinian territories by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. "This is borne out by the fact that some 80 percent of settlers in the West Bank will be included on the Israeli side of the wall," he said.