Israeli troops kill five militants

Israeli troops killed five Palestinian militants today, including two Hamas gunmen who slipped across the fenced boundary with Gaza for a rare cross-border attack.

Two other militants were killed while trying to plant a bomb near a Jewish settlement in an occupied part of Gaza, Palestinians said. At least one other gunman was killed and an Israeli soldier wounded in a shoot out near another settlement.

The latest bloodletting shattered a brief lull in violence since Friday when Israel wound up a major offensive in the northern Gaza Strip launched last month after a Palestinian rocket attack killed two Israeli toddlers in a border town.

More than 100 Palestinians, three Israelis and a Thai farm worker were killed in 17 days of fighting in the army’s biggest military campaign in the coastal territory since the start of a Palestinian uprising four years ago.

An Israeli military source said two gunmen were shot and killed today after breaching the heavily guarded fence around Gaza and approaching a kibbutz in southern Israel’s Negev desert.

One of the militants died in an explosion apparently caused by the detonation of a bomb or an explosives belt he was carrying, the source said.

Hamas, an Islamic militant group sworn to Israel’s destruction, said it had sent the gunmen, both from the Rafah refugee camp in southern Gaza, to carry out the attack.

Shortly afterward, soldiers at an outpost outside the settlement of Rafiah Yam in southern Gaza shot dead two Islamic Jihad militants planting a bomb nearby, Israeli and Palestinian sources said.

Soldiers later killed one militant in a gun battle between the southern Gaza settlement of Kfar Darom and the Kissufim crossing with Israel, security sources said. One soldier was wounded when the gunmen opened fire on an army jeep.

There has been almost no let-up in Gaza violence as Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon tries to push ahead on his plan to evacuate all settlements in the Strip by the end of next year.

Militants want to portray any Israeli pullout as a withdrawal under fire. Sharon is determined to smash armed groups first.