GAZA: Unidentified militants bomb a Christian bookshop in Gaza City

Unidentified militants bomb a Christian bookshop in Gaza City, causing severe damage but no casualties. A bomb damaged a Christian bookshop in the Gaza Strip on Sunday (April 15), Palestinian police said, but no casualties were reported. Palestinian security men and shop workers gathered on site to clean up the bombed shop as books and pictures of Jesus and Christian religious figures were scattered across the floor and in the damaged book shelves. No one claimed responsibility for the attack. While attacks against Christian sites in the territory are rare, at least 40 Internet cafes and video cassette shops have been blown up in the past several months. Many of these bombings were claimed by a previously unknown group, "The Righteous Swords of Islam". Local residents said an explosion shortly before dawn at the Protestant Holy Bible Society in Gaza City, blew out windows and ignited a fire that burned shelves of books. Police said a bomb caused the blast. Elsewhere in Gaza City, a bomb destroyed an Internet cafe, police said. At least 3,000 Christians live among the 1.5 million Palestinians in the conservatively Muslim Gaza Strip. Relations between Muslims and Christians in the territory have been good. The bombings were carried out a day after the Palestinian cabinet ratified a security plan aimed at stopping mounting lawlessness in the Gaza Strip, where rival factions frequently clash. Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas, an Islamist group that formed a unity government with the secular Fatah faction last month, said the new administration was determined "to end security anarchy". The security plan sets up a liaison mechanism for rival security forces in a new push to promote law and order.

ITN Source | April 16, 2007

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