Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Israel kills militants, 2 kids in airstrike

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published June 14, 2006

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - An Israeli airstrike on a top Palestinian rocket launcher and his accomplice also killed two children and six other civilians Tuesday.

The violence could hurt attempts by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and the West to pressure the Hamas government to moderate its virulently anti-Israel stance.

Abbas accused Israel of "state terrorism," and the Islamic Jihad militant group vowed to avenge the death of its chief rocket launcher, Hamoud Wadiya.

In recent months, volleys of homemade Palestinian rockets at southern Israel have provoked harsh Israeli artillery and airstrikes.

On Tuesday, Israel sent aircraft after militants it said were on their way to carry out a rocket attack.

A first missile missed the militants' yellow van as it traveled along a main road in Gaza City and sent it crashing into a curb, Palestinian witnesses said. Two more missiles killed two militants inside the van, as well as eight civilians who had gathered near the site of the first strike.

Two of the dead were children, and three were medical workers on their way to tend to the wounded.

Ambulances took the 10 dead and 32 wounded to Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. Doctors had to treat some of the wounded on the bloodied floor. At the hospital's morgue, women shouted, "Death to Israel, death to the occupation!"

Hekmat Mughrabi said her 30-year-old son, Ashraf, and another 13-year-old relative died when the first missile struck the curb outside her home. The young man, hearing the explosion, ran to the door to calm children who had been on the roof making paper kites.

Amir Peretz, the Israeli defense minister who reportedly delayed a major air offensive so Palestinians could curb the rockets, said all restraints were now off.

After inquiry, Israel denies it caused blast that killed Gaza beachgoers

JERUSALEM - Defense Minister Amir Peretz said Tuesday that Israel was not responsible for a blast that killed eight Gaza beachgoers, rebuffing Palestinian accusations that blamed an Israeli artillery round.

An Israeli inquiry concluded that the blast was caused by an explosive buried in the sand, not from Israeli shelling on the afternoon of the Palestinian family's beach picnic.

It was not clear how the explosive got there, or whether it might have been an unexploded Israeli shell from an earlier military barrage. Peretz did not address that issue. Israel has been claiming that Hamas militants planted a device to set off against Israeli commandos.

Palestinians rejected the findings, saying militants were unlikely to plant bombs at a beach teeming with hundreds of people every weekend.

[Last modified June 14, 2006, 07:21:11]