Attacks pose threat to Middle East truce

JERUSALEM – Israel threatened Sunday to invade Gaza if Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas does not control militants who have stepped up rocket and mortar attacks ahead of Israel’s planned pullout from the coastal strip next month.

Abbas pledged to do his utmost to stop the barrages but warned that an invasion of Gaza would “sabotage everything.”

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said all restraints are off and thousands of Israeli troops have massed along the Gaza border. The escalation is the most serious threat to a 5-month-old truce that had drastically reduced Palestinian-Israeli violence after more than four years of bloodshed.

More than 100 rockets and mortars have rained down on Gaza settlements and Israeli villages just outside the territory in the last four days. Hamas leaders say they are retaliating for Israeli violations of the truce.

But one leader said the main reason for the barrage is to show that Israeli settlers are fleeing Gaza under fire rather than in a planned evacuation.

In violence Sunday, Israeli soldiers killed a Hamas leader and Palestinian infiltrator, and the air force fired on a car in northern Gaza, wounding a bystander. The military said it had targeted militants on their way to firing rockets but had missed. And two Israelis were badly wounded in a Palestinian mortar strike on a Gaza settlement.

Another confrontation was developing on a separate front. Police refused to issue a permit to settlers for a mass march toward Gaza today. Talks broke down when settlers refused to declare a time when the protest would end. Defiant settler leaders said they plan to go ahead.

Scuffles have occurred at the main crossing point into Gush Katif, the main bloc of settlements, every day since Israel declared Gaza off-limits to nonresidents last week.