Reuters, Gaza :
Hamas claimed 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 US- and UN-sponsored truce.
The statement by Hamas’s armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, appeared aimed at preempting any intensification of Israel’s 25-day-old Gaza offensive as well as deflecting international blame for the collapse of Friday’s ceasefire.
Israel says Palestinian gunmen stormed out of a tunnel to ambush its infantrymen in southern Rafah a 9.30 a.m., one and a half hours after the halt to hostilities came into effect, killing two and hauling away an army lieutenant, Hadar Goldin.
Hamas said that if Goldin had been captured he may have been killed in Israeli hostilities that followed the raid.
The incident triggered mid-morning Israeli shelling of Rafah that killed 150 Palestinians. By early afternoon, Israel declared an end to the truce – which was meant to have lasted 72 hours, allowing for humanitarian relief to reach Gaza’s 1.8 million Palestinians and for further de-escalation talks.
Washington accused Hamas of a “barbaric” violation of the Egyptian-mediated agreement that has also involved Turkey, Qatar and US-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. The United Nations, while saying it had not verified the circumstances of the flare-up, questioned Hamas’s truce commitment and demanded Goldin’s release.
Citing an internal investigation complicated by inability to communicate with its gunmen in the area of the ambush in eastern Rafah, 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 issued in Arabic and English.
“The Qassam Brigades has no information as of this time about the missing soldier, his whereabouts, or the circumstances of his disappearance.”
Israel, with US backing, had said that during any truce its ground forces would continue their main mission of locating and destroying tunnels that have been used for Hamas for several cross-border attacks.
Israeli officials have long voiced concern that Palestinian guerrillas would try to capture a soldier or an Israeli civilian. In 2011, Israel released more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for Gilad Shalit, a soldier snatched by Hamas five years earlier.
Hamas, whose gunmen are dug in for battle in Gaza’s battered districts, deemed such Israeli moves potential provocations.
