Israeli Airstrike Kills 10 Palestinians

Eight Civilians Among Dead; Israel Denies Role in Last Week's Fatal Beach Explosion

Mourners carry a Palestinian boy who was killed in an Israeli airstrike Tuesday in Gaza City. Also among the dead were four Palestinian medics who had rushed to the scene from a nearby hospital after hearing the first of two blasts. (By Majeed Hamdan -- Associated Press)

GAZA CITY, June 13 -- An Israeli airstrike here Tuesday killed at least 10 Palestinians, including eight civilians, in the deadliest such attack this year.

Later in the day, the Israeli military said an internal investigation showed that it was not responsible for a deadly explosion on a Gaza beach last week that Palestinian officials have called a war crime.

Tuesday's airstrike occurred just before noon when an Israeli military aircraft fired one missile at a minibus near a busy intersection, killing two gunmen from the radical Islamic Jihad movement. Military officials said the car was transporting homemade missiles of the kind Islamic Jihad has been firing into southern Israel, a near-daily occurrence that has picked up in the past week.

Witnesses said a second missile, fired seven minutes later as a crowd gathered to help the wounded, sprayed shrapnel into the tin-roofed home of Ashraf al-Mughrabi, a 31-year-old barber, who was standing outside his front door. The blast killed him instantly, as well as his 6-year-old son, Maher, and his 13-year-old nephew, Hisham. Nisreen al-Mughrabi, Ashraf's wife, was severely wounded.

Also killed in the explosion were three Palestinian medics who had rushed to the scene from the Mohammed al-Dura Children's Hospital a block away after hearing the first blast. Earlier reports indicated that four medics were killed. Several remain hospitalized.

Hours later, an angry funeral procession led by armed men from the Fatah party, to which Ashraf al-Mughrabi belonged, paraded to his home, bearing aloft his body on a makeshift stretcher, along with his son's body.

"They were like family, our comrades," Leila Fatoum, 39, an assistant administrator at the hospital, said of her colleagues.

The strike highlighted the sharp surge in the Israel-Palestinian conflict in recent weeks and came at a time when Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert have pledged to seek ways to return to peace talks, which were abandoned more than five years ago.

According to U.N. humanitarian monitors, the Israeli military has killed 32 Palestinians since the beginning of this month, less than half of them members of armed groups at war with Israel. An additional 109 Palestinians have been wounded, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported.

Over the same period, Palestinian rockets have wounded 11 Israelis, one gravely, according to Magen David Adom, Israel's emergency service. The Israeli military reported that 38 rockets were launched toward Israel from Gaza in the 24-hour period before Tuesday's airstrike.

The armed confrontation between Israel and the Palestinian militias, including the armed wing of the radical Hamas movement now running the Palestinian government ministries, has coincided with a worsening internal conflict among the Palestinian parties. Deep partisan divisions within the security services have split its more than 70,000 members into rival camps, a combustible situation made worse by delays of more than three months in payment of salaries because of economic sanctions.

Fighting between Hamas and Fatah cooled Tuesday, one day after security forces in Ramallah dominated by Fatah loyalists ransacked the Palestinian parliament and cabinet offices -- institutions controlled by Hamas.