Hamas announced yesterday that it would freeze its rocket attacks on southern Israel, after Israeli war aircraft bombed the Gaza Strip.

The Islamist group, which has run the blockaded coastal enclave since 2007, said it had come to an agreement with other militant groups that in future they would fire the crude home-made missiles only in response to Israeli strikes.

The agreement was designed to “keep together the internal front and the supreme national interest of the Palestinian people”, a spokesman for Hamas’s armed wing said.

Israel launched a huge offensive against Gaza almost a year ago in which more than 1,400 Palestinians were killed, according to Palestinian medical groups. The main aim of the operation was to stamp out years of rocket fire. Although the attacks declined significantly, they were not halted.

The announcement may be a response to reports that Israel is close to an agreement with Hamas for the release of an Israeli soldier captured by the militants more than three years ago. Gilad Schalit is expected to be exchanged for hundreds of Palestinian militants being held in Israeli prisons.

Israeli sources said that Saturday’s air raid, in which at least five Palestinians were wounded, was aimed at a weapons factory and smuggling tunnel in the southern Gaza Strip.

In the West Bank, senior Fatah officials have been calling for peaceful protests outside Jewish settlements.

On Saturday, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, said that the demonstrations should be modelled on the weekly protests against the construction of a huge security barrier by Israel inside the West Bank.

“The people must struggle to remove the occupation,” Mr Abbas told the BBC. However, he ruled out any repeat of the armed struggle that the Palestinians waged from 2000 and which has now largely petered out.

The string of suicide attacks and shooting rampages inside Israel, as well as attacks on Jewish settlers, led to Israel re-occupying autonomous Palestinian areas of the West Bank, and the construction of the barrier.

Mr Abbas spoke of his disappointment at US and European efforts to force Israel to halt the construction of settlements in the West Bank, which is the main Palestinian precondition for resuming peace negotiations with Israel’s right-wing government.

Mr Abbas recently voiced his anger at the lack of progress and said he would not stand again for president in elections next year.

In Egypt, Israel’s ceremonial president, Shimon Peres, told his Egyptian counterpart Hosni Mubarak today that all settlement growth would cease when peace talks began.

“The minute we shall start to negotiate there won’t be new settlements, there won’t be confiscation of land,” Mr Peres said.

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