Israel authorizes arms shipment to Abbas

The prime minister authorized a weapons shipment to fight Hamas.
COMBINED DISPATCHES
LONDON -- Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Tuesday he had given the go ahead for a shipment of weapons to Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, whose loyalists are engaged in bitter infighting with the militant Islamic Hamas.
Violence between armed members of Hamas and forces from Abbas' rival Fatah movement have killed 20 Palestinians over the past month.
"I authorized last night the transfer of arms and ammunition to chairman Abu Mazen in order to strengthen his presidential guard, so he can strengthen his forces against Hamas," Olmert said, referring to Abbas by his widely-used nickname.
"I did this because we are running out of time and we need to help Abu Mazen," Olmert told said at a meeting with members of Britain's Parliament.
Olmert later traveled to Paris for two days of talks with French leaders. The arms shipment includes about 375 rifles and ammunition, said an Olmert aide, who was not authorized to speak to the media by name.
Violence
Meanwhile, an Israeli airstrike in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday killed 11 Palestinians, including nine civilians, in the deadliest such attack this year.
Later in the day, the Israeli military said an internal investigation showed that it was not responsible for a deadly explosion on a Gaza beach last week that Palestinian officials have called a war crime.
Tuesday's airstrike occurred just before noon, when an Israeli military aircraft fired one missile at a mini-bus near a busy intersection, killing two gunmen from the radical Islamic Jihad movement. Military officials said the mini-bus was transporting homemade missiles of the kind Islamic Jihad has been firing into southern Israel, a near-daily occurrence that has picked up in the past week.
Witnesses said a second missile, fired seven minutes later as a crowd gathered to help the wounded, sprayed shrapnel into the tin-roofed home of Ashraf al-Mughrabi, 31, a barber standing outside his front door. The blast killed him instantly, as well as his 6-year-old son, Maher, and his 13-year-old nephew, Hisham. Nisreen al-Mughrabi, Ashraf's wife, was severely wounded.
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