JERUSALEM — An aide to Israel’s public security minister was wounded by a Palestinian gunman yesterday as he toured an observation point overlooking the Gaza Strip with a group of Canadian tourists.
Dozens of other people were at the site at the time, Cabinet Minister Avi Dichter said, but no one else was hurt.
The deputy director of Barzilai hospital in Ashkelon, Dr. Emile Hay, said Mr. Dichter’s bureau chief, Matti Gil, was in stable condition with gunshot wounds to the lower abdomen and pelvis.
Several militant groups claimed responsibility for the attack, including the military wing of Gaza’s ruling Hamas movement, the militant offshoot of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party, and two little-known radical Islamic groups inspired by al Qaeda, the Army of the Nation and Protectors of the Homeland.
Shootings across the border fence are fairly rare. Militant groups in Gaza, however, fire rockets into southern Israel almost every day, often prompting retaliatory air strikes and land incursions.
In a separate incident, a dozen Islamic militants who had agreed to serve jail time as a way to get taken off Israel’s wanted list escaped from a Palestinian prison in the West Bank late yesterday, charging that guards beat them.
The 12 members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades fled after masked guards at the Palestinian government’s Jneid jail began to pummel them with clubs following a fight among the detainees, the escapees’ leader, Mahdi Abu Ghazaleh, said by telephone.
The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an offshoot of Mr. Abbas’ Fatah party, is known for some of the most serious suicide bombings and shootings in the conflict that broke out in 2001, being blamed for the deaths of more than 1,100 Israelis.
A commitment by Mr. Abbas to rein in militants and stop violence is a key part of peace talks that started up again late last year.
Meanwhile, a video Hamas released after the shooting near Gaza, taken from the Palestinian side, showed a gunman firing across a field of thistles toward a group of people standing near a tour bus and cars.
“This is to confirm the continuation of our holy war and … the targeting of every Zionist on our pure land,” read a claim on Hamas’ official Web site. Mr. Dichter was the target of the shooting, the statement said.
Moshe Ronen, a Toronto resident present during the attack, was touring southern Israel with the board of the Canada-Israel Committee, which he chairs, to learn about life there under rocket fire.
“Within a few seconds of the sound of the shooting we understood we were being fired on,” Mr. Ronen said. “The secret service of Minister Dichter told us to get down on the ground and both the minister and I were pushed to the ground and had our heads in the sand and didn’t move for about 10 minutes.”
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