This Article is From Mar 10, 2012

Israeli air strikes kill 14 in Gaza

Israeli air strikes kill 14 in Gaza
Gaza City: Israeli air strikes on Gaza killed 14 Palestinians, including a militant group chief, medics said on Saturday, in the deadliest 24 hours in the border area in more than three years.

Two men riding a motorcycle in the town of Khan Yunis were killed in a raid on Saturday, medics said. They had earlier reported one man as clinically dead but said he died later in hospital.

The Israeli military confirmed its aircraft attacked a target in the Gaza Strip but had no immediate details.

The raids came as Palestinian militants fired at least 90 rockets and mortar rounds into southern Israel since Friday morning, according to an army spokeswoman.

The Palestinian barrage injured four people, one of them seriously, Israeli military sources said.

Israeli media said that three of the casualties, including the badly wounded man, were agricultural labourers from Thailand working on a farm near the border with Gaza.

Local residents interviewed on radio and television said they had been told to stay close to bomb shelters and that large public gatherings had been banned, leading to the cancellation of several football matches on Saturday.

An army statement said earlier that the air force had attacked a range of targets in Gaza since Friday.

One of the retaliatory air strikes killed the head of the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC), Zohair al-Qaisi, and fellow member Mahmud Hanani, the ultra-hardline militant group said.

The PRC threatened reprisals for Qaisi's death.

Al-Quds Brigades, the military wing of Islamic Jihad, said the air strikes also killed 10 of its members.

Thousands of mourners, many chanting calls for revenge and firing automatic weapons into the air, buried the 12 Palestinians killed earlier at funerals across the strip on Saturday.

About 1,000 took part in Qaisi's funeral in the southern Gaza town of Rafah.

The Israeli military said its air raids were "in direct response to the rocket fire at Israeli communities in southern Israel."

"Aircraft targeted a terrorist in the central Gaza Strip and six additional terrorist squads who were in the final stages of preparing to fire rockets at Israel from separate locations in the northern and the central Gaza Strip."

The PRC and Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed offshoot of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas's Fatah movement, said they fired rockets into Israel on Friday.

The Palestinian WAFA news agency quoted a statement by the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority condemning Israel's retaliation, saying it would "escalate the circle of violence in the region."

The Israeli military said Qaisi "was among the leaders who planned, funded and directed" a deadly cross-border attack into southern Israel from Egypt's Sinai peninsula last August.

In that attack, gunmen carried out a coordinated series of shooting ambushes on buses and cars on Route 12, which runs along the Egyptian border, 20 kilometres (12 miles) north of the Israeli Red Sea resort of Eilat.

The shootings took place over several hours, leaving eight dead and more than 25 wounded.
The army said on Saturday that it had once again closed Route 12 to traffic, "in light of situation assessments and security considerations."

The PRC militants killed on Friday night were "responsible for planning a combined terror attack that was to take place via Sinai in the coming days," according to the Israeli military.

Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, has maintained a tacit truce with Israel, but other armed Palestinian groups regularly fire rockets and mortars across the border, often sparking retaliatory air strikes.

The relatively small PRC is one of the most active.

"We are not committed to the truce; we will respond very strongly to this (Israeli) crime," Abu Ataya, a spokesman for the PRC's military wing, the Al-Nasser Salaheddin Brigades, told AFP.

Hamas also branded the killings a crime.

"The Al-Qassam Brigades mourn the martyr leader Zohair Qaisi and martyr Mahmud Hanani and confirm that their blood will not be wasted, the enemy's crime will be a curse on him," the group's military wing said in a statement.

"The recent Zionist escalation ... comes as a part of the destabilisation of a stable security situation in the Gaza Strip," the Hamas-run Gaza government's interior ministry said.

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