Israel raids three Gaza camps

1.00pm

GAZA - Israeli soldiers backed by tanks and helicopters attacked militant targets in three Palestinian refugee camps in the Gaza Strip late on Tuesday, witnesses and security officials said.

More than 20 armoured vehicles rolled into a camp in Rafah, near the Egyptian border, and a similar number went into Deir el Balah in central Gaza. Bulldozers wrecked at least five houses in the Khan Younis camp as helicopters flew overhead, witnesses said.

Dozens of families fled their homes in Rafah, to shelter at schools or with relatives away from the scene of the raids, witnesses said.

An Israeli military source said soldiers were attacking militant targets in all three places. They were searching for tunnels used to smuggle in weapons and trying to prevent further shootings of mortars and anti-tank rockets at Israelis in Gaza.

The raids were in response to an ambush on Monday in which an Israeli mother and her four children from a Jewish settlement in Gaza, were shot and killed in a car near the Gaza border, the Israeli source said.

Earlier on Tuesday, soldiers shot and killed two Palestinians, including a 15-year-old bystander, in an incursion in Khan Younis.

Israeli soldiers arrested at least four Palestinians in separate raids in the West Bank cities of Ramallah and Hebron. Two people were arrested at a hotel in Ramallah which the troops searched room by room, witnesses said.

Palestinians brought in bulldozers earlier on Tuesday to clear some rubble outside President Yasser Arafat's Ramallah headquarters, fearing a possible Israeli raid there, witnesses said. However, no troops were seen near the area.

In Hebron, soldiers shot and wounded one militant and arrested him and another suspect, an Israeli military source said.

The military action came a day after Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon vowed to punish militants who dispatched the assailants in Sunday's Gaza ambush, which occurred the same day as his right-wing Likud party rejected his US-backed plan to quit Gaza.

- REUTERS