MIDDLE EAST: Since the Palestinian presidential election campaign kicked off on December 25th, the front-runner, Mr Mahmud Abbas, has repeatedly called for an end to the armed uprising, and said that the government must be the sole authority in the Palestinian territories. Israel is in complete agreement with these positions.
Mr Mahmoud Abbas, the usually moderate, measured front-runner in the Palestinian elections to choose a successor to Yasser Arafat, lashed out at Israel yesterday.
He called it the "Zionist enemy," after an Israeli tank shell slammed into a strawberry field in the Gaza Strip and killed seven people, most of them children from the same family.
Israel insisted that most of the dead were militants who had been targeted because they were firing mortar shells at a settlement in northern Gaza, one of which landed near a bus carrying schoolchildren.
An official in the Prime Minister's Office accused Palestinian militants of using civilians as cover, but one military official said that, if civilians had been hit, the army was "sorry."
A Palestinian doctor in the town of Beit Lahiya, near where the incident took place, said the dead included six members of the Ghaben family - three brothers, aged 13, 14 and 16, and three cousins aged 10, 12 and 22. Six more people were wounded in the attack, some of them critically.
Palestinians in the field where the shell hit said the incident began when several militants fired mortar shells from where they were working and Israeli tanks fired back.
One eyewitness described how "suddenly there was an explosion and body parts flew."
Fighting in Gaza has escalated in recent weeks, with militant groups, keen to portray an Israeli withdrawal from the Strip as their victory, stepping up the firing of rudimentary mortar shells at Jewish settlements and the launching of makeshift rockets - with a longer range - at a town inside Israel.
With Palestinian elections on January 9th, Mr Abbas has sharpened his rhetoric, especially during a four-day campaign stint in Gaza, where he has tried to woo young militants who have been critical of his calls to end the armed nature of the intifada uprising.
"We came to you today, while we are praying for the souls of the martyrs who were killed today by the shells of the Zionist enemy in Beit Lahiya," Mr Abbas told thousands of supporters.
Referring to Israel as the "Zionist enemy" was Mr Abbas's harshest attack on the Jewish state since taking over as interim Palestinian leader following Yasser Arafat's death in November.
Israeli leaders, who view Mr Abbas as a more pragmatic leader than Mr Arafat, yesterday attacked him for the first time since he took over as interim head of the Palestinian Authority.
"Israel is very concerned about Abu Mazen's [ Abbas's] recent statements which are very militant . . . and the likes of which we haven't heard in a long time," said the Foreign Minister, Mr Silvan Shalom.
Rabbinic leaders of the ultra-Orthodox party that the Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, needs to form a coalition have been procrastinating over whether to join the government, partly because of pressure exerted on them by settler leaders opposed to the Prime Minister's plan to withdraw from Gaza.