#news Israel launches attacks against Gaza-based Army of Islam

by Saud Abu Ramadan GAZA, Nov. 21 (Xinhua) -- In the past three weeks, the Israeli army sent its war jets to the Gaza Strip and killed three members of the Gaza-based Islamic group Army of Islam in two separate aerial attacks. On Nov. 3, an Israeli war jet attacked the group member Mohamed al-Nemnem's car with a missile in western Gaza and killed him. Later on Nov. 17, war jets hit the car of Mohamed and Islam Yassin, also members of the group, and killed them in central Gaza. According to Israeli media, members of the Army of Islam are planning terrorist attacks against Israeli and other foreign targets in the Egyptian Sinai peninsula with the cooperation of al- Qaida. The group also plans to kidnap Israelis and exchange them for Palestinian prisoners, said media reports. The Army of Islam was founded four years ago by Momtaz Doghmosh, an ex-Fatah militant, who became loyal to the Islamic Hamas movement. In June 2006, the group joined Hamas in kidnapping the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in a cross-border attack in southeast Gaza Strip, but ties between the group and Hamas were broken after the group was involved in kidnapping the BBC reporter Alan Johnston. After then, the Army of Islam militants fired homemade projectiles and mortar rounds at southern Israeli communities, which threatened a fragile ceasefire reached between Hamas and Israel at the end of the three-week Israeli offensive on Gaza that ended last January. After the Israeli attacks, Egyptian security intelligence sources denied Israeli security report that Egypt has coordinated with Israel through a joint plan to prevent attacks in Sinai. Egypt has not arrested any one of the Army of Islam in Sinai, said the sources. Meanwhile, Khaled Safi, a political analyst and a Gaza-based expert in radical Islamic movements, told Xinhua that Egyptian security forces had recently nabbed a terrorist group in Sinai " that apparently linked to the Army of Islam." "Israel had rigorously targeted the group as if it wants to warn the Army of Islam against violating interests in Egypt, especially in Sinai," Safi said, adding "undermining the group is not only an Israeli interest, but also in Egypt's as well as Hamas ' interests." Egypt has been sponsoring a dialogue between Fatah and Hamas, and observers believe that getting rid of radical groups that have links to al-Qaida and restoring a ceasefire with Israel, would help to achieve the inter-Palestinian reconciliation. Hamas has refused to sign on the Egyptian reconciliation pact that presented to the Palestinian factions about one year ago, saying that it has reservations over some phrases in the drafted pact.

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