Three children killed by Israeli air strike on Gaza

A Palestinian man carries a baby wounded in the airstrike. Picture / Reuters.

GAZA - An Israeli air strike aimed at Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip has killed three children standing nearby.

The strike, on Tuesday local time, came after Israel's defence minister pledged to step up action against cross-border rocket salvoes.

Witnesses said aircraft fired at least one missile at a car carrying al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades gunmen in Gaza City. The occupants managed to leap free but a 7-year-old girl, 5-year-old boy and a 16-year-old were killed.

Doctors initally said two of the dead were siblings but later determined they were unrelated. Nine other bystanders, most of them minors, were wounded.

Israeli Defence Minister Amir Peretz, under pressure from residents of border towns that have been targeted by Gazan rocket crews, had earlier promised new military counter-measures but did not elaborate.

Israel Radio quoted witnesses' reports of armoured units massing outside northern Gaza. There have been no major Israeli ground operations in Gaza since Israel quit the strip last year after 38 years of occupation in a bid to defuse conflict.

The air strike came hours after Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, trying to salvage peacemaking with Israel despite opposition from the new Islamic Hamas government with which he shares power, urged an end to the rocket fire.

"The president holds any faction that violates the calm fully responsible for any sabotage, destruction and victims that befall our people as a result of the imminent Israeli aggression," Abbas' office said in a statement.

An Israeli army spokesman said the air strike had targeted militants wanted for attacks on Israel. The spokesman expressed regret over any civilian casualties but said responsibility lay with the Palestinians for failing to stop the rocket salvoes.

The Islamic Jihad militant group said it fired two rockets into Israel to avenge the strike. There were no casualties.

Some militants, including al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a group in Abbas' Fatah faction, say they are fighting for Israel's withdrawal from the West Bank, captured like Gaza in the 1967 war and sought by Palestinians as part of a future state.

Other groups are sworn to Israel's destruction, though the largest, Hamas, has largely abided by a 16-month-old truce.

Citing Hamas' hardline platform, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has been lobbying for foreign support for a plan to remove isolated Jewish settlements in the West Bank while annexing others in blocs behind a new, fortified border.

Abbas hopes to head off the unilateral "realignment plan" by winning Palestinian backing in a referendum for his vision of a two-state peace accord. Hamas has opposed this, but postponed on Tuesday a bid to have the plebiscite declared illegal.

Hamas crushed the more moderate Fatah in a January vote, but since taking office has had its popularity sapped by a freeze in Western aid to the Palestinian Authority. Street fights between Hamas and Fatah gunmen have raised fears of civil war.

Alarmed by the deepening economic crisis in the West Bank and Gaza, the Quartet of foreign mediators - the United States, European Union, United Nations and Russia - approved setting up an alternative funding mechanism at the weekend.

Western diplomats said Israel wanted the new funding to be conditional on Palestinians signing a document renouncing terrorism, but a European Commission source said no decision had been taken on any system for vetting recipients.

Israel's tactics have been under renewed foreign scrutiny since seven Palestinians died in a June 9 blast on a beach in Gaza that the Hamas government blamed on Israeli artillery. Israel denied responsibility.

- REUTERS