After Ending Truce, Hamas Fires Back

The ruling Hamas group fired a barrage of homemade rockets at Israel on Saturday, hours after calling off a truce with Israel in anger over an artillery attack that killed seven civilians in Gaza.

The Hamas militants' announcement to call off the cease-fire, reached in February 2005, raised the prospect of a renewed campaign of deadly suicide bombings and a wave of bloodshed.

Hamas is promising more attacks, including suicide bombings, reports CBS News correspondent Robert Berger from Jerusalem.

Hamas claimed responsibility for launching at least 15 of the rockets fired after midnight, as well as a barrage of mortar bombs. The attacks caused no casualties, and the Israeli army said nearly all of the rounds appeared to have landed inside Gaza.

"The earthquake in the Zionist towns will start again and the aggressors will have no choice but to prepare their coffins or their luggage," the Hamas militants said in a leaflet. "The resistance groups ... will choose the proper place and time for the tough, strong and unique response."

Israel's artillery attack on Friday was part of a wider aerial and artillery bombardment of suspected Palestinian rocket-launching sites that killed a total of 10 people, three of them militants.

The violence fueled tensions already high over an Israeli airstrike on Thursday that killed the Hamas government's top militant commander, Jamal Abu Samhadana.

Friday's artillery attack tore into a beachside picnic in Gaza, killing seven civilians, and leading Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to condemn the attack as a "genocidal crime." He called for international intervention and declared a three-day period of mourning.

His rival, Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas, said the shelling was a "war crime" and urged an end to recent fighting between Hamas and Abbas' moderate Fatah movement.

But overnight Saturday, gunmen shot and killed a 39-year-old Palestinian security officer in a botched kidnapping attempt, the Palestinian Preventive Security said.

Later, the top general in the Gaza Strip got caught in the crossfire of a Hamas-Fatah gunbattle on Saturday while he was attending the officer's funeral.

The convoy of Rashid Abu Shbak, Abbas' top security chief in Gaza, was driving through the funeral procession when the gunfight erupted between Hamas gunmen and Palestinian Preventive Security officers. No casualties were immediately reported in the fighting.

The force, loyal to Abbas and Fatah, accused Hamas of the killing and vowed to "stop Hamas' game whatever the price."