Israel Steps Up Military Action in Gaza Strip
At Least Eight Palestinian Gunmen Killed in Airstrikes Meant to Halt Rocket Attacks in South
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Sunday, April 9, 2006
JERUSALEM, April 8 -- Two Israeli airstrikes in the Gaza Strip on Saturday killed at least eight Palestinian gunmen, part of an intensifying military campaign designed to stop rocket fire into southern Israel.
The first strike came just after noon in northern Gaza, the most common launch site for the homemade rockets that have been landing in southern Israel on a near-daily basis for weeks. Witnesses said two members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed wing of the Fatah movement, were killed.
Late Saturday evening, an Israeli military aircraft fired on a car near the city of Khan Younis in southern Gaza, killing at least six people. The men were identified as members of the Abu Rish Brigades, an armed splinter group of Fatah. At least 15 others were wounded, hospital officials said.
Emergency workers at the site, near the former Israeli settlement of Neve Dekalim, warned that the toll could rise as they combed through wreckage in the darkness.
"This Israeli escalation aims to bring the Palestinian people on their knees and to blackmail the government in order to win over political concessions," Ismail Haniyeh, a leader of the radical Palestinian group Hamas who is now prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, told reporters in Gaza before the second airstrike. "We will remain loyal to the rights of our people, and we will not give anything that may harm these rights."
The two airstrikes Saturday followed one the previous evening that killed six people, including a 5-year-old boy.
Palestinian emergency workers initially had said the airstrike Friday on a car leaving a militant training camp in southern Gaza killed Eyad Abu al-Einen, a leader of the Popular Resistance Committees, another armed splinter group dominated by former members of Hamas, and his daughter. But they later said family members identified the remains of the dead child as his son. His daughter was gravely wounded.
Israel's Haaretz newspaper quoted Ghazi Hamad, a spokesman for the new, Hamas-led government, as saying Saturday's attacks amounted to a "brutal massacre."
Hamad suggested that Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, should reconsider his support for peace talks with Israel.
"Maybe it's an important message to the president today that Israel is not interested in peace or political compromises," Hamad said.
Special correspondent Islam Abdel-Kareem in Gaza City contributed to this report.
