(dpa) - A day after eight people died in an explosion in Gaza, the Islamic Hamas movement on Saturday slammed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas for pursuing peace talks with Israel.
The explosion ripped through a house in al-Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, killing senior Islamic Jihad militant Ayman al-Fayed, his wife, a number of his daughters and neighbours, Palestinian witnesses said.
According to the witnesses an Israeli warplane had struck al- Fayed's house, but an Israeli army spokesman said in statements that the Israeli air forces were not involved on Friday night in air attack on any target in the Gaza Strip.
"Abbas should be ashamed of those martyrs. He must immediately boycott the occupiers (Israelis). Otherwise, history will register him in its black pages," Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoom told reporters in Gaza.
"What happened in al-Bureij has exceeded all the red lines," Barhoom said, adding that Israel "must shoulder the responsibility for the responses that the Palestinian resistance factions will send."
Abbas has held peace talks with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert while slamming his opponents from Hamas, which ousted his Fatah faction from the Gaza Strip after deadly clashes in June and has asserted its control over the coastal strip.