Palestinians carry the body of a 65 years old man they say was killed by the Israeli army, during his …
JERUSALEM – The Israeli military says three rockets fired from Gaza have hit the Israeli city of Ashkelon. No one was hurt.
The barrage is a sign of escalating violence on the Israel-Gaza border. Israel has been hitting back for rocket attacks with airstrikes at militant facilities and smuggling tunnels in Gaza.
Palestinians say in another incident Monday, a 65-year-old Gaza man was shot dead from an Israeli guard tower on the border. The military had no immediate comment.
The rockets hit an industrial area on the southern edge of Ashkelon, which is six miles (10 kilometers) north of Gaza. The city has been a frequent target of Palestinian rocket squads when violence escalates.
The rocket fire came a day after Gaza's Hamas rulers appealed for calm.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.
JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel's prime minister on Monday defended the construction of a new Israeli enclave in an Arab neighborhood in east Jerusalem, rejecting a wave of international condemnation.
The Palestinians, the European Union and the U.S. have all condemned the planned building of 20 apartments for Israelis on the site of an empty hotel in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. The project, approved in 2009, began in earnest Sunday with the demolition of the Shepherd Hotel.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu brushed off the criticism, saying the construction was a private project carried out "in accordance with Israeli law."
"There should be no expectation that the state of Israel will impose a ban on Jews purchasing private property in Jerusalem," Netanyahu said in a statement. "No democratic government would impose such a ban on Jews and Israel will certainly not do so."
Israeli-Palestinian peace talks have been stalled for more than three months, in large part because of Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank and east Jerusalem.
The Palestinians refuse to negotiate as long as Israel continues to build new homes in these areas, captured territories on which the Palestinians hope to establish an independent state. Netanyahu has called for peace talks without preconditions.
During a trip to the Persian Gulf, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Sunday she was "very concerned" about the east Jerusalem project, saying it "contradicts the logic" of a negotiated peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
The European Union's foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, condemned the "illegal settlement" and said such projects "undermine trust between the parties and constitute an obstacle to peace."
The dispute over east Jerusalem is the most explosive issue in Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts. Israel annexed the area, home to sensitive Jewish, Christian and Muslim holy sites, after the 1967 war.
Although that move has never been internationally recognized, Israel considers the entire city its capital and has ringed east Jerusalem with a series of Jewish neighborhoods meant to solidify its control of the area. In addition, several thousand nationalist settlers live in heavily guarded enclaves inside Arab neighborhoods like Sheikh Jarrah.
The Palestinians claim east Jerusalem as their capital and consider all Israeli residents in the area to be illegal settlers.
The Shepherd Hotel was built in the 1930s as the residence of the mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Husseini, a Nazi sympathizer who was forced to flee Jerusalem's British rulers at the end of the decade.
The building was later controlled by Jordan, which ruled east Jerusalem after 1948, and then taken over by Israel when it captured east Jerusalem in the 1967 Mideast war. The Israeli government sold the plot to Jewish American businessman Irving Moskowitz, a longtime patron of Jewish settlers, in 1985.
After years of bureaucratic delays, Moskowitz received the necessary permits to proceed with his development in 2009. The project's backers say an additional 50 apartments are planned for the site.
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