Two Israeli soldiers killed in Gaza shooting

10.45am

GAZA - Palestinian militants shot dead two Israeli soldiers in southern Gaza on Friday in the latest of several deadly attacks this week against the Middle East's mightiest army.

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.

The latest attack brought the total soldier deaths in Gaza this week to 13, the worst blow to Israel's army in two years.

The militant group Hamas claimed responsibility for the shooting, which occurred while soldiers were destroying buildings along a Gaza-Egypt border corridor that Israel controls and plans to widen by demolishing homes.

Palestinian security officials said the army destroyed a house while three residents were inside and that they were missing and feared dead.

Military sources said the house had been damaged by gunfire during a gunbattle between militants inside and soldiers outside the building.

Officials at the camp estimated that 80 houses had been demolished in Rafah since a militant attack on an army carrier on Wednesday. Witnesses said hundreds of Palestinians fled after army bulldozers began knocking down their houses and stores.

At least 500 Palestinians gathered inside a U.N.-run school in the camp, taking cover in the classrooms and school yard. Abdel-Karim Radwan, 37, said he and his nine-member family rushed into the school, waiting for the raid to end.

"My house is located less than 100 meters away from where the vehicle was blown up on Wednesday, do you think it will be standing when the Israelis leave?" he said. "I hope, for the sake of my family and elderly parents, I hope."

Israel has already destroyed hundreds of structures in the camp while trying to uncover weapons-smuggling tunnels during the past three-and-a-half years of conflict.

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Earlier on Friday, witnesses said Palestinian militants blew up two Israeli soldiers in an armored vehicle in the Rafah camp, with Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades taking responsibility. It was not clear whether the conflicting accounts of the soldiers' deaths referred to the same incident or two separate incidents.

Also in Rafah, a Palestinian died from helicopter fire. Military sources said helicopters fired warning shots at open areas where gunbattles occurred between soldiers and militants.

Five soldiers in an explosives-packed troop carrier were killed in Rafah on Wednesday, a day after a similar attack in Gaza City in which six soldiers died. Israel killed 28 Palestinians in Gaza fighting including militants and bystanders.

Polls showed deepening support in Israel for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's Gaza pullout plan, now stalled by hard-liners 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.

Israeli political sources had said dozens or even hundreds of Palestinian homes in Rafah refugee camp, 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.

Major Sharon Feingold, an army spokeswoman, said the army had so far demolished only abandoned structures that had been used by gunmen to fire on Israeli troops searching for soldiers' scattered body parts from Wednesday's ambush.

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 nine km (six miles) and is now 250 meters (yards) 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