GAZA/JERUSALEM: Hamas acknowledged responsibility on Saturday for a deadly Gaza Strip ambush in which an Israeli army officer may have been captured, but said the incident likely preceded and therefore had not violated a U.S.- and U.N.-sponsored truce.
The statement by Hamas’s armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, appeared aimed at preempting any intensification of Israel’s 25-day-old offensive in the Palestinian enclave and deflecting international blame for the collapse of Friday’s ceasefire.
But in a signal the war could wind down, Israel’s military said its objectives, chiefly the destruction of tunnels dug by Hamas for cross-border attacks, were close to being achieved.
Israel says Hamas gunmen and a suicide bomber stormed out of a tunnel to ambush its infantrymen in southern Rafah at 9.30 a.m. on Friday, one and a half hours after the halt to hostilities came into effect, killing two troops and hauling another, Lieutenant Hadar Goldin, away through the underground passage.
The incident triggered Israeli shelling of Rafah from the mid-morning that killed 150 Palestinians.
By early afternoon, Israel declared an end to the truce – which was meant to have lasted 72 hours, allowing humanitarian relief to reach Gaza’s 1.8 million Palestinians and for further de-escalation talks.
Washington accused Hamas of a “barbaric” breach of the deal mediated by Egypt with the involvement of Turkey, Qatar and U.S.-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. The United Nations said it had not verified the flare-up’s causes, but questioned Hamas’s truce commitment and urged Goldin be freed.
Hamas said it did not know what had happened to the soldier but if he was captured, he probably died in Israeli hostilities that followed the ambush.
Citing an internal investigation complicated by inability to communicate with its gunmen in the Rafah area, Hamas’s Qassam Brigades said on Saturday it believed that the ambush took place at 7 a.m. in response to advances by Israeli ground forces.
“We lost contact with the (Hamas) troops deployed in the ambush and assess that these troops were probably killed by enemy bombardment, including the soldier said to be missing – presuming that our troops took him prisoner during the clash,” the Brigades said in a statement.
“The Qassam Brigades has no information as of this time about the missing soldier, his whereabouts, or the circumstances of his disappearance.”
Quoting an unnamed military officer, Israel Radio also said Goldin’s condition was not known. It said he was last seen next to the two troops killed by a Hamas suicide bomber – suggesting he may not have survived either and his captors held a corpse.
Israel, with U.S. backing, had said that during any truce its ground forces would continue hunting cross-border tunnels. More than 30 of these, and dozens of access shafts, have already been located and were being blown up, the Israeli military says.
“Our understanding is that our objectives, most importantly the destruction of the tunnels, are close to completion,” a military spokesman, Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Lerner, said.
Israel had long voiced concern that Palestinian guerrillas would try to capture a soldier or civilian. In 2011, Israel released more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for Gilad Shalit, a soldier snatched by Hamas five years earlier.
Israel has in the past twice freed prisoners in exchange for the bodies of soldiers held by Lebanon’s Hezbollah guerrillas.
Palestinian officials say 1,653 Gazans, mostly civilians, have been killed. Sixty-three Israeli soldiers have been killed, and Palestinian shelling has killed three civilians in Israel. (Reuters)
