Ten killed as Israelis pound Gaza strip

Ten Palestinians died and around 100 were wounded in a series of Israeli air strikes in the Gaza Strip yesterday, including seven killed in a refugee camp as helicopter gunships targeted a car.

Last night’s strike in the Nusseirat camp in central Gaza, in which 75 people were injured, was the bloodiest since an April missile raid on a Hamas leader in Gaza City killed nine people.

Residents said Israeli helicopters fired three missiles at the main street, destroying a car. An Israeli army statement said the vehicle was carrying members of a Palestinian terrorist squad fleeing after a failed attempt to breach the border fence with Israel a few miles to the north east.

Residents said one of the dead was a doctor who was treating victims when a second missile struck.

Israel’s Channel 10 TV said that none of the dead was a militant, characterising the refugee camp strike as a ”mistake”.

The Palestinian health ministry initially said eight people were killed in the raid, but hospitals later revised the toll to seven.

Hundreds of residents carried charred pieces of the vehicle and chanted; “Revenge, revenge.”

During three years of violence, Israeli air strikes in Gaza have caused dozens of civilian casualties.

In April, an air attack killed Hamas leader Said Arabeed and eight other people. In July 2002, 15 people were killed, including nine children, in an air strike that targeted another Hamas leader, Salah Shehadeh.

Israeli planes and helicopters struck five times yesterday, hitting a suspected Hamas weapons cache twice, another storehouse and a car carrying suspected militants.

Violent Islamic movements, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, threatened revenge for the Israeli air strikes, but Israel’s premier pledged more raids, further clouding Middle East peace efforts.

“The Israeli military will continue to act to foil terror attacks, capture murderers and liquidate terror organisations,” prime minister Ariel Sharon told parliament.

Israeli helicopters also fired missiles at a building in the Shajaiyeh neighbourhood of Gaza City last night, the same structure that was hit in an earlier air strike that day, residents said. Eleven people were wounded, they said. Israeli military sources said the attack was meant to finish the work of the first one.

The first three air strikes, a day after Palestinian militants fired eight home-made rockets from Gaza into Israel, destroyed two weapons labs and warehouses of Hamas, the military said. Four children and a 70-year-old woman were among 25 wounded. Two missiles exploded on a street crowded with schoolchildren.

Negotiations over implementing the “road map” plan, formally presented in June, have sputtered amid violence and political turmoil. The plan calls for an end to the three-year conflict and leads to a Palestinian state in 2005.

But except for a six-week Palestinian stand-down in the summer, clashes and bombings have continued unabated. The Palestinians have been unable to field a stable government, and with Israel and the United States boycotting Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, no recent contacts have been held between Israeli Palestinian officials.

In his speech to parliament, Sharon called Arafat “the greatest obstacle to peace”. Therefore, he added, “Israel is determined to bring about his removal from the political arena”, referring to a Cabinet decision last month.

Sharon’s criticism of Arafat was greeted with catcalls and prompted several Arab MPs to walk out of the chamber. The speech also received a harsh response from Shimon Peres, leader of the opposition Labour Party, who accused Sharon of being insincere in his peacemaking efforts.

“Prime minister, you have missed the opportunity,” Peres said.

“We are dealing with a nation that is fighting for its freedom, and don’t take them lightly.”

Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian peace negotiator, called Sharon’s address a “speech of continuing the use of the most disproportionate use of force against Palestinians and a speech that was determined to undermine hope, peace, and reconciliation”.