Abbas demands end to rocket attacks

A statement from his office announced that Abbas "calls on all armed groups to cease firing rockets immediately and to fully respect the truce", agreed by the main militant groups early last year.

"Any faction that does not respect the truce will bear the entire responsibility for the destruction and casualties that will result from an Israeli aggression against the Gaza Strip," it added.

The statement was published as Abbas prepared to hold his first meeting with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, on the margins of a Nobel laureates conference hosted by Jordanian King Abdullah II this week.

Israel earlier threatened a tougher response to persistent rocket attacks that have seen around 130 fired off in the past 10 days alone, with Defense Minister Amir Peretz hinting he could order a massive military operation.

Olmert has repeatedly called on Abbas to dismantle armed Palestinian factions, including the armed wing of Hamas, as a precondition to resuming stalled Middle East peace talks.

Israel has castigated the moderate Abbas, who has been locked in a power struggle with the governing Islamists, for failing to tackle rampant insecurity in the Palestinian territories, where militants operate largely with impunity.

"The prime minister, the defense minister, others and myself have reached the conclusion no one will be protected if the ... (rocket) terrorism continues," the chairman of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Tzachi Hanegbi, told public radio.

'None of terror organizations are protected'

Peretz, himself a resident of the town, has come under criticism from fellow locals for failing to order tougher military response to the attacks, and has been raked over the coals by critics for his own lack of military expertise.

"Within a few dozen hours there is going to be a drastic change in the security issue, and none of the terror organizations are protected," he was quoted as saying by local media late Monday.

The mass-selling Yediot Aharonot newspaper also reported that IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz and his deputy Moshe Kaplinsky have begun intensive talks on a possible large-scale operation in the Gaza Strip.

Israeli troops have so far refrained from full-on operations in Gaza since withdrawing from the territory last September after a 38-year occupation.

Israeli aircraft earlier attacked what the army said was a weapons-making factory in Gaza City operated by the ruling Palestinian faction Hamas.

Sderot has been besieged by more than 1,000 projectiles since the second Palestinian uprising erupted in 2000, killing five people. In total more than 5,000 people have been killed in the uprising, most of them Palestinians.

Amid a spike in violence following the deaths of eight Palestinian picnickers on a Gaza beach on June 9, which independent investigators blamed on Israel, militants have fired more than 130 rockets at Israel.

At the behest of Sderot mayor, Elie Moyal, the town's 20,000 council staff went on strike Tuesday to protest against the insecurity.

"All we want is for residents' security to be guaranteed," Moyal, a member of the right-wing opposition party Likud, told public radio.

For a few hours, residents closed entrances and exits to the down-at-heel Negev desert town, around a kilometer (less than a mile) from the Gaza Strip.

Although notoriously inaccurate, primitive Palestinian rockets have caused death, injury, psychological distress and emigration from Sderot.