Israel tries to kill Islamic Jihad chief in Gaza

1.45pm

GAZA - Israel tried to assassinate the top leader of the militant Palestinian group Islamic Jihad in a missile strike in Gaza City on Saturday in apparent retaliation for the killing of 13 soldiers this week.

Islamic Jihad officials said four missiles hit a building housing Mohammed al-Hindi's office but that he safely fled the area. The attempt on his life drew a vow from his followers of an "earthquake-like" revenge attacks against the Jewish state.

The air raid followed Israel's assassinations of the two senior Hamas leaders in the Gaza Strip in recent weeks and threats to keep striking at the militants' upper echelons based in the coastal territory.

The missile barrage came hours after two Israeli soldiers were killed by Hamas militants in a refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip in the latest in a series of ambushes that has dealt the Middle East's mightiest army its worst blow in two years.

Polls showed deepening support in Israel for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's Gaza pullout plan, now stalled by hardliners in his own rightist party, as this week's losses reminded Israelis of the high cost of the hard-to-defend Gaza settlements.

The Gaza violence has also raised concern among Israeli military planners that Palestinians have adopted the tactics of Lebanese Hizbollah guerrillas that eventually ended Israel's occupation of south Lebanon in 2000.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Islamic groups sworn to Israel's destruction, are the driving force behind a campaign of suicide bombings that have killed hundreds of Israelis during three and a half years of conflict.

Hamas claimed responsibility for killing six soldiers in a troop carrier on Tuesday during a raid in Gaza City, and Islamic Jihad said it was behind a similar bombing that killed five servicemen on Wednesday.

Israel killed 28 Palestinians, including civilians, during four days of fierce fighting in Gaza.

"We will respond to the cowardly attempt on the life of our leader by punishing the Zionist enemies," Islamic Jihad official Khader Habib told Reuters. "There will be an earthquake-like response that will shatter the Zionist entity."

Helicopters first struck an Islamic studies centre where al-Hindi worked and then hit the building of a Jihad-linked group that supports families of Palestinians who have killed or been killed in the conflict with Israel, witnesses said.

Islamic Jihad officials had originally said al-Hindi's home had been targeted, but later said they had been mistaken.

Medics said at least 13 people were wounded in the air strikes. The Israeli army had no immediate comment.

On Friday, militants shot dead two soldiers in Rafah while troops were destroying buildings along a nearby Gaza-Egypt border corridor that Israel controls and plans to widen by demolishing homes.

An army statement said a soldier had helped a Palestinian woman carry bags into her apartment and was shot dead by snipers outside the building. When a rescue team arrived, militants shot at them as well, killing another soldier.

Israeli political sources had said dozens or even hundreds of Palestinian homes on the edge of the "Philadelphi" buffer zone would be razed in coming days in a bid to deny cover to militants who attack troops daily.

The new plan seemed aimed at countering critics who have accused the army of leaving its forces vulnerable in the border buffer zone, which runs 9km and is now 250m wide in some places.

Palestinian cabinet minister Saeb Erekat condemned the corridor's expansion as being in "total contradiction" to what Sharon had presented as "disengagement" from points of conflict.

- REUTERS