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White House blames Hamas for Mideast violence

NEW BRITAIN, Connecticut (AFP) - Days after warning Israel against efforts to kill Palestinian militants, the White House blamed resurgent Middle East violence squarely on the extremist group Hamas.

"The issue is Hamas. The terrorists are Hamas," spokesman Ari Fleischer said as US President George W. Bush traveled here to give a speech on health care. "They are the enemies to peace, in the president's judgment."

Asked whether Bush stood by remarks on Tuesday in which he scolded Israel for airstrikes targeting Hamas members, Fleischer replied: "I leave it at just where I put it this morning."

Israel's helicopter attacks were followed by a suicide bombing, claimed by Hamas, that killed 16 people, and by later Israeli missile strikes in a tit-for-tat cycle of carnage that has thrown the peace process into disarray.

Fleischer downplayed the likelihood that Bush would ramp up active US telephone diplomacy and reach out personally to prime ministers Ariel Sharon of Israel or Mahmud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority.

"It's not as if a phone call will get Hamas to stop being terrorists," he told reporters aboard Bush's presidential Air Force One airplane.

Hamas warns foreigners to get out of Israel

GAZA CITY (AFP) - The military wing of the radical Palestinian Islamic group Hamas warned foreigners to leave Israel for their own safety while threatening new attacks against the Jewish state.

In a statement received here by AFP, the Ezzedin al-Qassam Brigades advised foreigners to "leave the Zionist entity to ensure their security since we will strike everywhere."

It added that the suicide bombing of a commuter bus in Jerusalem on Wednesday by one of its members that left 16 other people dead was "only the beginning of a new series of reprisals against the Zionists who occupy our country."

"The Al-Qassam cells are called upon to act rapidly to transform the Zionist entity into blood and ruins," it said Thursday.

It said the attempted assassination of top Hamas political leader, Abdul Aziz al-Rantissi, the most senior figure in the group to have been targeted since the September 2000 start of the uprising, was a "cowardly operation conducted by the enemy government which believed the summits in Sharm El-Sheikh and Aqaba assured it a cover."

US President George W. Bush convened a summit with Palestinian prime minister Mahmud Abbas and moderate Arab leaders at the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh on June 3.

Another was held a day later between Bush, Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon at Aqaba, Jordan, to reaffirm their commitments to a peace roadmap to end the 32 months of fighting.

But amid the tit-for-tat attacks this week which have killed almost 50 people on both sides, the Israeli army has been ordered to "completely wipe out" the Hamas movement, according to Israeli public radio.

In the latest bloodshed, at least six Palestinians died, including a three-year-old girl, when several Israeli helicopter gunship rained missiles on a target in northern Gaza City, Palestinian medical sources said.