By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, June 14, 2006

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.

The past five days have been particularly volatile ones in the territories.

On Friday, eight civilians picnicking on a beach here were killed in an explosion that Palestinian witnesses said was the result of an Israeli artillery shell. Israel has been firing artillery into Gaza, sometimes hundreds of shells a day, to put down the steady Palestinian rocket fire.

Six members of the Ghaliyah family perished in the blast, and Abbas later adopted the family's 11-year-old girl, Huda, whose desperation in the minutes after the explosion was caught on video and turned her into a symbol of the conflict for many Israelis and Palestinians.

But Israeli defense officials said Tuesday that an internal investigation found that the military was not responsible for the explosion. At a news conference in Tel Aviv, Maj. Gen. Meir Kalifi, who led the inquiry, said it concluded that artillery shells that the Israel Defense Forces fired Friday afternoon could not have landed in the area where the family was picnicking.

"I can say, I can rule out, in a definite and unequivocal manner, the possibility that any kind of firing from the IDF during these hours, or others, is the source that caused the damage," said Kalifi, who is deputy commander of Israel's land forces.

Using maps to illustrate his points, Kalifi said that the military fired six artillery rounds toward the beach during the time in question and that all but the first landed more than 500 yards from the site of the fatal explosion. He said the investigation could not determine where the first shell landed, but he said it was fired at the same trajectory and in the same direction as the five others.

Kalifi also said that shrapnel taken from a Palestinian woman being treated for her wounds in Soroka Medical Center, in the Israeli city of Beersheba, did not come from a 155mm artillery round -- the kind fired that day.

Although Israeli military leaders did not officially accuse the Palestinians of responsibility for the explosion, military sources have indicated privately in recent days that the blast was the result of land mines that Hamas gunmen laid along the beach to prevent Israeli commandos from entering the area from the sea.

But a human rights investigator specializing in military affairs raised doubts about those claims during a news conference in Gaza.

Marc Garlasco, a senior military analyst with New York-based Human Rights Watch, said he had not compiled enough evidence to say definitively that the Israeli military fired the fatal shell. But he said shrapnel gathered at the site, the wound patterns on Palestinians treated in Gaza hospitals and the characteristics of the crater left by the blast indicated that the victims were killed by a 155mm artillery shell that fell on the beach.

"It is my contention that the most likely scenario is that the blast was the result of Israeli shells coming down on the beach," said Garlasco, whose military experience includes seven years with U.S. military intelligence.

Garlasco was in Gaza to investigate the Palestinian rocket fire and Israeli response. His presence here at the time of the explosion, he said, was coincidental.

He said he examined the site a day after the explosion and acknowledged that wind and the number of people who trampled the area after the blast made conclusions difficult. Nevertheless, he said, shrapnel he found lodged in a car near the explosion and other samples collected by the Palestinian bomb-disposal unit made clear it was from a 155mm shell.

He said the size and depth of the crater -- roughly seven feet in diameter and six to eight inches deep -- suggested it was from a falling shell. He said he compared it with other craters left by Israeli artillery on the beach, a frequent target because of its use by Palestinian rocket launchers, and the sizes were similar.

Garlasco also said most of the 30 people injured in the explosion suffered from wounds to the torso and head, while a land mine generally does the most damage to the lower body. But he said he could not rule out that the shell had been left on the ground.

Special correspondent Samuel Sockol in Jerusalem contributed to this report.