Abbas condemns brutal Israeli incursions into Gaza Strip, Hamas calls for stopping negotiations with Israel

Israel closes Gaza crossings, continues massacres, bulldozers take off trees, demolish homes

Dozens of Palestinian civilians killed or injured in Israeli raids

Shas party threatens to quit Olmert's government

In the Gaza Strip, Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri said negotiations with Israel were "a crime against the Palestinian people."

"The negotiations taking place between the Palestinian Authority and occupation under these hideous Zionist crimes are useless and absurd negotiations," said Abu Zuhri, adding that the Palestinian Authority's insistence on holding those negotiations despite these daily crimes is also a crime that must come to a halt.

An Islamic Jihad spokesman rejected a cease-fire. The group has vowed revenge following last week's Israeli strikes in Gaza that killed the group's military commander. "Talking about a cease-fire under Israeli attack is rejected by Islamic Jihad before this enemy is punished for its crimes in Gaza and the West Bank," said Khaled al-Batsh, a leader of the group.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Tuesday lashed out at an Israeli military operation in Gaza City and termed it as "a massacre and mass execution."

We can't remain silent before the crimes of killing our Palestinian people... such crimes don't bring any peace," Abbas told reporters in Ramallah.

Acting speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) warned Israel that their continued acts of aggression against the Palestinian people will have consequences, calling on Palestinian resistance groups to "teach the Israeli occupation a lesson they will not forget."

"It is time the Israeli occupation was punished for its atrocities," Ahmad Bahar said.

Bahar emphasized that he supports the Palestinian resistance in its response to the ongoing Israeli aggression. He called on the resistance groups "to close ranks and teach the Israeli occupation a lesson they will not forget."

"The Israelis were driven crazy by their defeat in the Gaza Strip, and so they chose to conduct targeted assassinations against Palestinian citizens and whole families," he added.

Furthermore, Bahar called on Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to take immediate action to end the Israeli aggression and to halt all negotiations with the Israeli occupation.

"It has become unacceptable that negotiations go on in light of the Israeli criminal acts," he said.

Medical sources reported on Saturday that Israeli air strike east of Gaza City has killed at least three citizens.

In the same regard, another Al-Qassam activist twenty-one-year-old Shadi Qteifan has died of wounds he sustained east of Gaza City during the air raids targeted Al Zaitoun neighborhood.

Thus the death toll in Gaza Strip from Thursday morning till Saturday rises to 37 and more than 130, 25 described as critical conditioned.

Palestinian sources reported that the Israeli army military offensive in the eastern part of the Gaza Strip that started on Tuesday at dawn has come to an end, leaving 19 Palestinians dead and at least 50 injured.

Al Qassam brigade, the armed wing of Hamas, announced that among those killed were 13resistance fighters. The brigade statement added that Hussam al Zahar, son of the prominent Hamas leader Dr Mahmoud Al Zahar, was among those killed in the attack.

Dr. Moaiya Hassanain, the head of ambulance and emergency services in the Palestinian Health Ministry, said many of the dead and wounded in Gaza lost limbs.

Because of the high number of casualties, Hassanain questioned whether Israeli Defense Force (IDF) troops were using tank-fired flechette shells, an anti-personnel weapon that throws out thousands of metal darts.

On the other hand, Carlos Andres Chavez, 20, a volunteer from Ecuador, was shot in the back by a sniper while working in the potato fields of Israeli Ein Hashlosha kibbutz farm. The sniper attack presented Israeli farmers working in their fields with a deadly new threat.

Zahar accused Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas of complicity in his son's death. "This is the hope of Abu Mazen and his colleagues, the collaborators with Israel and the spies of America," Zahar said, referring to Abbas by his nickname. Hamas, he vowed, will respond to Tuesday's raid "in the appropriate way. We will defend ourselves by all means."

Israeli helicopters assassinated a leader in the military wing of the Popular Resistance Committees, the An-Nasser Salah Addin Brigades, and his wife by shelling his car as he was traveling near Sheikh Zayid City in the northern Gaza Strip on Thursday afternoon.

Palestinian medics and sources within the An-Nasser Salah Addin Brigades named the victims as forty-three-year-old Ra'd Abu Al-Ful and his forty-year-old wife Amina Abu Al-Ful.

Muawiya Hassanain, the director of ambulance and emergency services in the Palestinian Health Ministry confirmed that the bodies of the victims were torn to pieces. They were taken to Kamal Udwan hospital in the northern Gaza Strip.

The Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, the military wing of the Popular Front claimed responsibility on Friday for launching three projectiles at Sderot and several kibbutzes in the western Negev on Friday morning.

Meanwhile, the Al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas' military wing announced they had launched a Qassam rocket at an Israeli military base, near the Karm Abu Salem crossing.

Separately, the An-Nasser Brigades, the military wing of the Popular Resistance claimed responsibility for launching two projectiles at the Karm Abu Salem military base, east of the city of Rafah in the Gaza Strip.

The brigades said their actions were a response to the recent Israeli assassinations in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Israeli troops killed a wanted Palestinian militant in the West Bank town of Nablus early Friday, Palestinian medics said. The militant, Ahmad Sanakra, 24, was a commander in the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed group tied to the Fatah Movement headed by moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. He had been on Israel's wanted list for several years but repeatedly eluded capture.

Consequently, leaders in Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades said they will avenge Sanakra’s death, “we think of halting the truce with the colonization army which didn’t stop for a single day on killing the Palestinian people and destroying its institutions and cities”, they said.

A twenty-three-year-old Palestinian fighter named Imam Ahmad died of his wounds on Monday, after being wounded days ago in an Israeli air raid on a civilian car in the town of Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip.

A woman was killed and 46 people were injured, three of them seriously, in an Israeli air strike on the interior ministry of the de facto government in the Gaza Strip, in Tel Al-Hawa, on Friday afternoon.

The building was completely destroyed and a missile hit a wedding party in front of the ministry, resulting in the injury of dozens of people, including women and children.

Meanwhile Israeli warplanes also bombed the marine headquarters of the security services, west of Dir Al-Balah. No one is reported injured.

Senior Hamas terrorists threatened Israel Wednesday night to cut off negotiations over kidnapped soldier. Gilaad Shalit if the IDF does not stop its counter-terrorism operations in Gaza.

Ehud Barak, the Israeli defense minister, has ordered the closure of all crossings into the Gaza Strip.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and officials from the defense establishment arrived for an unannounced meeting with community representatives in the western Negev Thursday.

Community leaders in the Sderot area gathered late Thursday night for an unannounced meeting with PM Olmert to discuss the increasingly dangerous conditions facing residents of the western Negev.

Olmert was accompanied by Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai as well as senior IDF commanders and security officials when he arrived at 10:00 p.m. for the meeting, which was held in a fortified day care center at Kibbutz Gavim, near Sderot.

On the other hand, an Israeli document recommends both Israel and its neighboring Arab countries to study the possibilities of a land swap between various countries to help settle the conflicts between them, specially regional ones.

Israeli Professors Ouzi Arad and Gideon Peter from The Multi Purpose Center proposed the document and are scheduled to be presented at the eighth Hertzilya conference.

The document suggests Israel could keep a part of West Bank under its control while some parts of Negev could be swapped to the Palestinians.

The two Israeli professors believe a deal between Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt will retain a number of regional swap processes that guarantee vital interests for all sides.

According to the suggestion, Israel will keep 200 km of West Bank that includes settlement blocks and lands in Jordan Valley. On the contrary, Palestinians will have lands along the green line, with or without its residents from 1948 Palestinians while Israel keeps 12% from Golan Heights. Syria in turns will have lands in Lebanon which have lands from Israel a compensation over 50 km square along the northern borders.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's wobbly coalition government was in growing danger of collapse after a hard-line right-wing party quit to protest peace talks with the Palestinians. .

The hawkish Avigdor Lieberman, who had been serving as both deputy prime minister and minister of strategic affairs, said he could no longer stay in a government that was willing to make a land-for-peace deal, as Mr. Olmert is negotiating to do with Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas. .

Mr. Lieberman's announcement came just two days after final status talks began in earnest at a meeting between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators in Jerusalem. Although peace talks have been taking place for months, it was the first time the so-called core issues of the decades-old conflict were discussed: the borders of a future Palestinian state, the future of Jerusalem and the fate of millions of Palestinian refugees scattered around the region. .

From his side, Iranian president Ahmadinejad announced, in an interview with Aljazeera Satellite Channel, that Israel will not have the gut to attack Iran and that his country’s response will make the Jewish state be sorry for such a doing. .

Gholam Hussein Elham, the Iranian government spokesman, said that it would be better for the US president, during his visit to the region, to apologize for the countries he visited because of his “wrong” policies and asked him to retreat.

Ha added that bush should apologize for killing the Palestinians as he supports the Zionist entity (Israel) and that he should leave a chance to his successors to compensate for his wrong policies.

Elham considered “insisting on wrong policies” in the region “will lead to nothing but increasing the resistance, and that is normal.” He calls the US “to stop supporting terrorism and Israel that symbolizes a significant example of terrorism in the region.”

Answering a question about the visit made by Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to Iran and his meeting with senior officials, Ahmadinejad said “it was good and helps cooperation between the two sides.”

Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, said that Iran should be worried because Israel can’t accept the idea of turning Iran into a nuclear force. He added that we have all choices to deal with the threat made by the Iranian nuclear program.