Wednesday

More deadly gunfire in the middle east

Israeli Army Kills Palestinian on Gaza Road-Medics

Wed Dec 15, 2004 03:30 PM ET

GAZA (Reuters) - Israeli troops shot dead a Palestinian man on Wednesday as he tried to cross a Gaza road they had sealed off near a Jewish settlement, Palestinian medics and witnesses said.

Soldiers later killed a Palestinian militant armed with grenades and an assault rifle who was trying to carry out an attack on a Gaza settlement, militant sources said.

Separately in Gaza, Palestinian militants shot and wounded four Israeli soldiers and a civilian in an attack on their vehicles on a road leading to Jewish settlements, an Israeli army spokeswoman said.

The army cut occupied Gaza into three sections with a series of blockades after an attack on Sunday in which five Israeli soldiers were killed when militants detonated a big bomb in a tunnel they dug under a military base in south Gaza.

Medics said Palestinian Mustafa al-Sawarka, 32, was shot dead while trying to slip across a Mediterranean coastal road blocked off by troops near Netzarim settlement. Another Palestinian man was seriously wounded in a second shooting at the same spot soon afterwards, witnesses said.

An Israeli military source said soldiers had fired warning shots toward Palestinian cars that sped into a closed military zone along the road but that none was targeted directly.

In the West Bank, militants from the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades shot dead a 20-year-old Palestinian man they said had acted as an informer for Israel and dumped his body in the central square of the city of Ramallah.

The Israeli army also demolished the family home of a Hamas militant in Hebron it said gave explosives to suicide bombers who killed 16 people in the Israeli city of Beersheba in August. The militant, Iyad Abu Shkheidem, was arrested two weeks ago.

After a brief period of relative calm following the Nov. 11 death of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, violence resurged last week with several deadly incidents in Gaza.

Israel tried to kill a senior militant in a helicopter missile strike that failed, while Palestinian armed groups resumed peppering settlements with mortar and rocket fire.

A mortar attack killed a female Thai farm labourer and wounded two others in the Ganei Tal settlement on Tuesday.

Militants want to portray Israel's planned withdrawal from Gaza, captured in the 1967 Middle East war, as a flight under fire.

Israel wants to prevent any such impression by smashing the militant leadership first, although it appears to have eased military operations to help Palestinian moderates in a Jan. 9 Palestinian election of a successor to Arafat.

(Additional reporting by Elana Ringler)
© reuters

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