Sharon stalls Netanyahu bid: exit polls

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon stalled a leadership challenge by rightist Benjamin Netanyahu in a Likud party vote on Monday, an exit poll showed. Israel Radio said Likud’s Central Committee voted by 51 per cent to 49 per cent against Netanyahu’s motion to advance a party leadership ballot to November in protest at the Gaza pullout Sharon championed. The primary is scheduled for April. The poll had a margin of error of 5 per cent.

Meanwhile, Israel launched multiple missile strikes in Gaza on Monday in response to Palestinian rocket fire. Israeli aircraft attacked at least five buildings which the army said were used by Hamas and other militant groups across Gaza for making or storing weapons. An Israeli jet fighter also fired two rockets into an empty field in north Gaza in what the army called a preventive measure. Troops also arrested 90 Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants in the West Bank, adding to 200 already picked up.

Hamas, the most powerful militant group, on Sunday called a halt to rocket attacks that it had said avenged the deaths of 16 people in a blast at a Hamas parade. Hamas blamed the explosion on Israel, though the army denied a role and the Palestinian Authority said it was an accident on the part of Hamas. Hamas’s most senior leader in Gaza, Mahmoud al-Zahar, said it had halted attacks to ensure the safety of Palestinians.

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But while Hamas drew back from rocket firing, other militant groups fired salvoes into Israel, causing no casualties, and vowed more attacks after the killing of a senior Islamic Jihad commander in an Israeli strike on Sunday.

A senior Palestinian official said Zahar acted after a furious phone call by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to Hamas’s exiled top leader, Khaled Meshaal, and after Egyptian warnings to the group “that it had gone too far” with the rocket barrage. —Reuters