Reservists on call in wake of raid

Palestinians inspect the wreckage of a vehicle after an Israeli airstrike at the main street in Gaza City. Photo / AP

Israel said it would call up 10,000 reservists as Palestinians vowed to avenge Israel's killing of three Hamas commanders in Gaza.

The strike on Thursday levelled a four-storey house in a densely populated neighbourhood of the southern town of Rafah, killing six people, including Mohammed Abu Shamaleh, Raed al-Attar and Mohammed Barhoum. Both Israel and Hamas identified the commanders killed in the air strike.

Israel said the trio had played a key role in expanding Hamas' military capabilities in recent years, including digging attack tunnels leading to Israel, training fighters and smuggling weapons into Gaza.

Thousands of Palestinians marched through Rafah in a funeral procession firing guns, waving flags of different militant groups and chanting religious slogans. Those killed were carried aloft through the crowd on stretchers, wrapped in green Hamas flags.

Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, said Israel "will not succeed in breaking the will of our people or weaken the resistance" and "will pay the price".

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised the "superior intelligence" of the Shin Bet security service and the military's "precise execution" of the attack.

An Israeli defence official said that ten thousand reserve soldiers would be called up for duty.

The killing of the three Hamas commanders will likely buy Netanyahu some time as the Israeli public becomes increasingly impatient with the Government's inability to halt rocket fire from Gaza.

Gaza police and witnesses said several missiles hit the four-storey building.

In pinpointing the whereabouts of the Hamas commanders, Israel probably relied to some extent on local informers. Israel has maintained a network of informers despite its withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, in some cases using blackmail or the lure of exit permits to win co-operation.

Al Majd, a website linked to the Hamas security services, said yesterday that seven suspected informers were arrested in recent days and that three were killed "after the completion of the revolutionary procedures against them".

It was the second time during the Gaza war that the website announced suspected informers had been killed by Hamas.

The Rafah attack came a day after an apparent Israeli attempt to kill the top Hamas military leader, Mohammed Deif, in an air strike on a house in Gaza City. Deif's wife and an infant son were killed in that strike, but the Hamas military wing said Deif was not in the targeted home at the time.

The body of his daughter, 5-year-old Sara Deif, was recovered from underneath the rubble yesterday.

The back-to-back targeting of top Hamas military leaders came after indirect Israel-Hamas negotiations in Cairo on a sustainable truce broke down on Tuesday.

Gaza militants resumed rocket fire on Israel, even before the formal end of a six-day truce.

Since then, Gaza militants have fired dozens more rockets, and Israeli aircraft have struck dozens of targets in Gaza.

- Independent