By DPA
Ramallah/Gaza : Widening its campaign against the ruling Palestinian party in response to more than a week of intense rocket fire from the Gaza Strip, Israel arrested 33 senior Hamas officials in raids throughout the West Bank Thursday.
The officials included Education Minister Nasser Eddin al-Shaer in Nablus as well as the mayors of Nablus, Adli Yaish, and Qalqilya, Wajih Qawwas, Palestinian officials said.
Two parliament members from Nablus, Hamid Bitawi and Raid Abu Sir, and one from Tulkarm were also among the detained, they said.
A military spokeswoman said Israel made the arrests because the radical Islamic movement was "copying its terrorist infrastructure from Gaza to the West Bank and is using government mechanisms to encourage and support" attacks against the Jewish state.
The spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, strongly condemned the move, which he called "punishment and revenge measures" that would only "increase the tension" and have "grave consequences."
He called on the US to intervene and "stop the Israeli aggression."
The arrests came after militant factions in the Gaza Strip, spearheaded by Hamas' armed wing, launched close to 200 Hamas-made Qassam rockets at southern Israel during the past eight days.
Israel, meanwhile, also continued its retaliatory strikes in the Gaza Strip, with tank shelling killing a Palestinian some 400 metres from the security fence on the northern Gaza border and overnight air strikes destroying three buildings and a car carrying militants, all in Gaza City.
Three bystanders were moderately wounded in the pre-dawn helicopter strike on the car, whose passengers managed to jump out moments before the rocket hit, witnesses said.
The military said the three buildings targeted were money exchange offices used to transfer millions of dollars a month in funding to militants from Iran, Syria and Lebanon.
The money was used to manufacture Qassam rockets and train and pay salaries to the militants involved in the rocket fire, it said. There were no immediate reports of injuries in those strikes.
Israel said its tanks were shelling an area in northern Gaza near the town of Beit Lahiya from where Qassam rockets were being launched.
The latest death raised to 37 the number of Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes since Wednesday last week.
Some 50 Palestinians have been killed in six days of fierce clashes between Hamas and Abbas' rival, coalition Fatah party, that ended with a tense internal truce Saturday afternoon.
The widening of Israel's campaign against Hamas comes as dozens of other Hamas officials, detained in July after Hamas' military wing and two other groups snatched Israeli Corporal Gilad Shalit and killed two other soldiers at a military outpost bordering Gaza, were still in Israeli jails.