JERUSALEM: The Israeli military carried out an air strike against a so-called rocket launching squad in the northern Gaza Strip on Sunday in the first such incident following a unilateral truce, the army said."We carried out a strike against a rocket launching squad in Beit Hanun," a spokesman told reporters. "It was the same squad that launched (rockets) into Sderot this morning."
Earlier a handful of rockets were fired from Gaza into Israel, with at least four of them landing inside the Jewish state without causing any injuries, the army said.
Israeli troops and Palestinian fighters also exchanged their first shots in Gaza on Sunday, puncturing a tenuous ceasefire after the Jewish state halted a deadly war on the Hamas rulers of the enclave.
As the army carried out its first air raid on militants firing rockets, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned that the unilateral truce Israel had begun hours earlier was fragile and was being constantly reassessed.
"The government's decision allows Israel to respond and renew the fire if our enemy in the Gaza Strip continues its strikes," he said at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem.
"This morning they again proved that the ceasefire is fragile and it has to be reassessed on a minute by minute basis," he said. "We hope that the fire ends. If it continues, the IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) will respond. It is prepared and deployed to do so."
Officials said that the clashes did not necessarily mean a return to all-out fighting.
"There will no doubt be isolated incidents," Israeli Infrastructure Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer said. "It will take two to three days for everything to end completely, for Hamas to understand that we are now in a new scenario."
Hamas, the Islamist movement that has ruled Gaza for a year and a half, has warned that it would not accept the presence of a single Israeli soldier in Gaza.
"We have clearly said: if Israeli troops remain in Gaza, this will be a wide window for the resistance against the occupation," Osama Hamdan, the group's representative in Lebanon, said in an interview with Al-Jazeera television.
On the ground, Palestinian medics took advantage of the relative lull in the fighting to descend on areas which had been inaccessible due to heavy clashes.
At least 95 bodies, including several children, were pulled from the rubble in northern Gaza, ARY OneWorld reported.
As Hamas congratulated the Palestinians on "victory" from mosque loudspeakers, Gaza residents cautiously ventured out into the streets to inspect the rubble that was once their homes.
"We congratulate all the Palestinian people after the victory in the fight with the enemy," bellowed a voice from a Hamas mosque in central Gaza City.
Olmert announced late on Saturday that Israel was unilaterally silencing its guns after an unprecedented 22-day-long campaign in Gaza, which killed at least 1,300 people, including more than 400 children, wounded another 5,300, and left large swathes of the territory in ruins.
On the Israeli side three civilians and 10 soldiers were killed in combat and rocket attacks.
"We have reached all the goals of the war, and beyond," Olmert said.
During the course of the war, schools, hospitals, UN compounds and thousands of homes all came under attack with the Palestinian Authority putting the cost of damage to infrastructure alone at 476 million dollars.
this news published by www.thearynews.com
