Israeli Strike Kills Pregnant Palestinian

JERUSALEM, June 21 -- An off-target Israeli airstrike in the central Gaza Strip killed a pregnant woman and her brother Wednesday and wounded at least 15 other civilians, including three children.

Shortly after sunset, an Israeli military aircraft fired on a vehicle in the city of Khan Younis, Palestinian witnesses said.

Israeli military officials said two missiles were fired at the vehicle, which they said was carrying members of the Popular Resistance Committees, one of the armed groups mainly responsible for firing rockets into southern Israel. The officials said one of the missiles struck the road and the second slammed into a house, which Palestinian witnesses said was about 60 feet away.

Palestinian hospital officials identified the dead as Fatima Ahmad el-Barbarawi, 37, who was seven months pregnant, and her brother, Zakariya Ahmad el-Barbarawi, 45, a physician visiting from Saudi Arabia. A 1-year-old child was also critically injured in the blast.

The incident brought to 14 the number of Palestinian civilians killed by Israeli aerial attacks in Gaza over the past eight days and prompted an internal review of the targeting process and equipment being used in the airstrikes.

"We are always reviewing these strikes, even without such tragic results," said Capt. Noa Meir, an Israeli military spokesman. "This is a very ugly war, and civilians get caught up in it. This is not the result we wanted."

The airstrike came a day after an Israeli missile attack on a car in Gaza City killed three children, prompting furious calls for revenge Wednesday as the victims were buried. It also came a week after Israeli military aircraft targeted a minibus being used by Palestinian gunmen to transport a Katyusha rocket, a type commonly fired at Israel. That strike killed nine Palestinian civilians, as well as two gunmen from the radical movement Islamic Jihad.

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs released an assessment Wednesday evening stating that 32 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza since June 9. Ten children were among the dead, the agency reported. At least six of the dead were members of armed Palestinian groups.

The agency included in those figures the deaths of seven members of a Palestinian family in an explosion June 9 on a beach in northern Gaza. The Israeli military has denied involvement in the blast, but Palestinian witnesses and a human rights group say evidence suggests it was caused by an Israeli artillery shell.

During a news conference Wednesday in Tel Aviv, Maj. Gen. Meir Kalifi, who headed the internal investigation into the June 9 incident, said shrapnel taken from Palestinians treated for wounds in Israeli hospitals did not come from the 155mm artillery shells being fired from the military's land-based guns that day. Marc Garlasco, a senior military analyst with New York-based Human Rights Watch, has said the blast likely came from such a shell.

Kalifi, the deputy commander of Israel's ground forces, left open the possibility that the blast was caused either by a previously unexploded Israeli shell or an explosive device planted by Palestinian armed groups.

Lt. Col. Eren Toval, who supervised the shrapnel tests, said at the news conference that the pieces contained traces of explosives used by both the Israeli military and Palestinian groups. Kalifi said the military investigation was continuing.

Special correspondent Islam Abdelkareem in Gaza contributed to this report.