UN workers among ten killed in Israeli raid

Israeli troops backed by tanks and helicopter gunships hunted a fugitive militant in a crowded Gaza refugee camp today, setting off chaotic gunbattles that killed 10 Palestinians, including two UN school workers.

Men called through mosque loudspeakers for people to come out and battle the Israeli soldiers.

Fighters who had been celebrating the Islamic festival of Eid el-Fitr, which marks the end of Ramadan, poured into the dark streets. Gun battles raged for three hours in the Bureij camp.

It was unclear how many of the dead were fighters. The military said a helicopter fired a missile into a street, killing five armed men from the Islamic Hamas movement. The camp’s mayor, Kamal Baghdadi, had originally said a tank shell had hit a building, killing seven people.

UNRWA, the UN agency helping Palestinian refugees, said two of its staff were among the dead: Osama Hassan Tahrawi, 31, who was killed along with two of his brothers by a missile, was a school attendant and a woman who died from shrapnel injuries, Ahlam Riziq Kandil, 31, was a school teacher.

Hassan Safi, 49, said he was 300 yards away in his home when an explosion rocked the neighbourhood. He said he thought the blast was from a tank shell.

“I rushed with my sons to the place, which was all destroyed,” Safi said. “I myself took out two people. The helicopter was firing with machine guns at us, making it difficult to move.”

During the incursion, witnesses said troops surrounded the home of Jamal Ismail, a suicide bomber who blew himself up along with another man in an explosive-packed boat off the Gaza coast last month, wounding four Israeli soldiers in a nearby navy patrol.

The Israeli army called the camp “a base for hardcore terror groups” of the militant Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Popular Resistance Committee.

Brigadier General Israel Ziv said the operation targeted Aiman Shasniyeh, a local leader for the Popular Resistance Committee, who the military believes was behind a bomb attack on a heavily armoured Merkava-3 tank that killed three soldiers in March.

Troops failed to find Shasniyeh but blew up his house. Soldiers arrested one of his brothers, along with another man wanted by Israeli intelligence, Ziv said.

It was Israel’s second strike this week in Gaza targeting militants allegedly involved in anti-tank attacks that have killed seven Israeli soldiers this year.