Militant commander dies in car explosion

ISLAMIC Jihad’s most senior commander in the Gaza Strip was killed yesterday by an explosion that tore through his car.

The Palestinian militant group has blamed the Israeli army for the attack, but Israel has denied being involved.

In the occupied West Bank, meanwhile, Palestinian gunmen shot dead an Israeli at a petrol station outside a Jewish settlement and wounded an Israeli motorist.

Witnesses to the death of Abu al-Waleed al-Dahdouh, head of Islamic Jihad’s armed wing in the Gaza Strip, said his car blew up as he opened one of its doors and that an Israeli military aircraft was flying overhead at the time.

“The Israeli army did not operate in Gaza,” a military spokeswoman said, “It wasn’t us.”

Describing Dahdouh’s death as an assassination, Nabil Abu Rdainah, a spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, called for international pressure on Israel to return to the negotiating table.

Prospects for a resumption of peacemaking have dimmed since the Islamic militant group Hamas, sworn to Israel’s destruction, defeated Abbas’s Fatah faction heavily in a January 25 election.

Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said on a visit to Vienna that Israel didn’t rule out talks with Hamas - once it recognises the Jewish state and renounces violence.

“I never say never,” she told reporters.

But Livni pressed Europe to ensure it did not directly fund a Hamas government. “Part of the idea of the free world fighting terrorism is not to work with terrorists, not to give money to terror,” she said.

Chanting “revenge, revenge,” hundreds of Islamic Jihad gunmen gathered outside Gaza’s Shifa Hospital after the explosion, hearing that Dahdouh’s body had been taken there.

He was killed hours after militants in Gaza fired a rocket toward the Israeli coastal town of Ashkelon.

“This is an Israeli assassination that killed one of our most important commanders,” said Khader Habib, an Islamic Jihad leader.

Abu Adallah, a spokesman for the group, said: “Our rockets will rain down on (Israelis). Islamic Jihad’s armed wing will not remain silent and will respond with all its might to avenge the death of its leader.”

The Israeli army has acknowledged killing dozens of militants in strikes on Gaza since a Palestinian uprising began in 2000.

Dozens have also died, however, after explosives they were transporting detonated prematurely.

Separately, two Palestinian gunmen shot and killed an Israeli at a settlement near Nablus, while an Israeli motorist was wounded in the neck in the shooting.

Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed group aligned with Fatah, claimed it carried out the Migdalim shooting as revenge for Israel’s killing of eight Palestinians in a Nablus raid last week.

UN officials, meanwhile, have warned that stocks of wheat, sugar and cooking oil in Gaza would begin to run out within days unless Israel reopened the strip’s main crossing point for goods.