Girl, 7, killed in Israeli attack, reports say

GAZA - An Israeli air strike killed six Palestinians including a senior militant commander and his seven-year-old daughter at a militant training base in the southern Gaza Strip on Friday, witnesses and medics said.

At least 12 people were wounded in the missile strikes that targeted a car as it was leaving the base, medics said. Apart from the girl, all the dead were militants from the Popular Resistance Committees and most were in the vehicle.

The Israeli army said a car carrying several "terrorists" was struck as it left the base near the town of Rafah on the border with Egypt.

"The vehicle was coming out of a training camp in which both training and weapons training were being conducted," an Israeli army spokesman said.

Militants and witnesses named the senior commander as Eyad Abu Al-ein of the Popular Resistance Committees, an umbrella group of militants that often fires makeshift rockets into Israel.

Medics said his daughter was dismembered. Abu Al-ein, also a bomb maker, had brought his daughter and son to watch training exercises at the base. The son was wounded.

A second car outside the compound was damaged in the strikes but not badly. Most of the wounded were militants.

Witnesses said Israeli aircraft fired three missiles.

The Israeli army spokesman said the military identified hitting one vehicle and not two, and was also checking reports of civilian casualties.

Nabil Abu Rdainah, a spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, condemned the air strikes and urged the international community to stop what he called a serious escalation by Israel.

"We demand the Israeli government immediately stop the aggression," Rdainah told reporters in Gaza where Abbas was holding a late-night meeting with Ismail Haniyeh, the new prime minister of the Hamas-led government.

Israel has stepped up its air strikes and artillery barrages into Gaza in recent days in response to regular rocket fire from Gaza, which Israel withdrew from last year after 38 years of occupation. The makeshift rockets rarely cause any casualties.

In the early hours of Friday, Israeli attack helicopters fired missiles at two offices of an armed wing of Abbas' Fatah movement in Gaza City, wrecking them, Palestinian security sources and witnesses said.

In a third Israeli air strike in Gaza before dawn on Friday, helicopters fired at a helicopter launch pad near Abbas' office in Gaza. There were no casualties in those raids.

- REUTERS