Teens die as Israel attacks Gaza refugee camps

Israeli forces backed by helicopter gunships swooped on Gaza refugee camps yesterday amid fresh violence in which five Palestinians and an elderly Israeli were killed.

The raids in central Gaza Strip came after Israeli forces killed four Palestinians, three of them teenagers. The Israeli Army said they were on their way to attack Jewish settlements.

In the Israeli village of Maor, close to the West Bank, police said they killed a Palestinian who broke into the home of an Israeli couple. Later, police found the scorched body of a 70-year-old Israeli man in the West Bank after an extensive search.

The renewed violence disregarded US calls for calm in the conflict to avoid complicating Washington's plans for a possible war on Iraq.

The Israeli Army ordered infantry and armour backed by assault helicopters into the Nusairat, Bureij and Maghazi refugee camps early on Thursday.

Ambulance workers said several Palestinians were wounded in raids which lasted several hours.

A top Palestinian human rights activist, Mustafa Barghouthi, called for a "mass international presence on the ground" to protect Palestinians from Israeli attack if Washington launched a strike to oust President Saddam Hussein.

The body of Israeli man Masoud Elon was found in a valley near the Jewish settlement of Bekaot after a claim of responsibility for his death by the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an offshoot of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction.

The group said in a statement on the Lebanese Hizbollah's al-Manar television station it had killed a "Jewish settler" in the Bekaot area to avenge the killing of a Palestinian.

Elon's family said the elderly man would frequently travel from his home in northern Israel into the West Bank to hand out clothes to Palestinian labourers and buy citrus fruits.

On Wednesday night, troops shot dead three Palestinian youths, one aged 15 and the other two 16, who they said had been trying to attack a Jewish settlement in northern Gaza.

"Thank God he got what he always dreamed of - martyrdom," Atteya Dawass, the father of one of the Gaza youngsters, said at their funeral.

The Army also said it killed a militant on his way to bomb a settlement in the West Bank.

- REUTERS

Herald feature: The Middle East