Israel Stages Raid in Gaza

JERUSALEM — Israeli troops, tanks and helicopter gunships staged a predawn raid in the central Gaza Strip early today, destroying militants’ homes and exchanging heavy fire with Palestinian gunmen. Seven people were killed, including a heavily pregnant woman and a 13-year-old boy, Palestinian witnesses said.

The strike, centered on the Bureij refugee camp, was the latest in an escalating series of Israeli incursions into crowded Gaza.

Israel’s defense minister, Shaul Mofaz, said Sunday that Israel would continue to batter the Gazan infrastructure of the militant group Hamas, which has killed scores of Israelis in attacks over the last 2 1/2 years.

Palestinians said that the Israelis pulled out of the ramshackle camp about 6 a.m. and that casualties were still being counted because ambulances and medics were having difficulty making their way through the debris-choked streets.

At least seven homes were destroyed and two local Hamas leaders arrested, they said.

In such raids, the army has often moved to destroy the family homes of militants accused of carrying out attacks against Israelis.

Palestinians denounce such punitive demolitions, but Israel argues that they serve as a deterrent against suicide bombings and other attacks.

The army would confirm only that an operation had taken place overnight in the Bureij camp and that troops had encountered strong resistance from gunmen who poured into the streets as calls for resistance rang out from local mosques.

“There was a lot of fighting, and it’s not impossible that some civilians were hurt,” said an army spokeswoman who would not consent to her name being used.

The Israelis have come under sharp and repeated international criticism for using excessive force and imprecise targeting in raids on crowded Palestinian urban areas, such as Bureij, carried out with battlefield weaponry including tanks and assault helicopters.

The incursion began shortly after midnight, when armored vehicles and tanks punched into the camp from two directions, according to witnesses. The power was cut as shooting erupted, and families were pinned inside their houses as the fighting raged outside.

About three dozen people were injured, according to initial reports. The pregnant woman was killed when her home, next to one of those being blown up, collapsed on her and her family, Palestinian witnesses said.

Also reported killed was a boy, believed to be 13, who was shot in the adjoining Nusseirat refugee camp. The circumstances of his death were not immediately clear.

“It was a terrible situation -- they came in very fast, and there was so much shooting, and we are not able to care for the injured,” said Kamal Baghdadi, chairman of the Bureij municipality.

It was the second night in a row that a Gaza camp had been targeted by Israeli troops with fatal results. Early Sunday in the Khan Yunis camp in southern Gaza, two Palestinians -- one a gunman, according to witnesses, and one a man in his 50s who was trying to wait out the fighting at home -- were killed during a similar incursion.

Later Sunday, as thousands of chanting mourners filled the rutted streets for the funerals of the two, a young boy was shot in the head and died later in a hospital. Witnesses and doctors said the child, Abdul Rahman Jadallah, was 9, but other reports put his age at 12 or 13.

Palestinian witnesses insisted that the fatal shot was fired by Israeli soldiers manning an outpost overlooking the local cemetery, which guards the adjacent Jewish settlement of Neve Dekalim.

Israeli military officials said a preliminary investigation produced no evidence that its troops had fired on the crowd of mourners, and they noted that, as is the custom at funerals like these, masked Palestinian militants were firing automatic rifles into the air.

Palestinian doctors said the bullet that struck the boy was the type used by Israeli soldiers.

This has been a particularly violent few weeks in Gaza, beginning with the fiery deaths Feb. 15 of a four-man Israeli crew when a land mine blew up beneath their tank as they patrolled the perimeter of a Jewish settlement in the north. Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack.

Israeli raids in reprisal for that attack -- which the army said were also aimed at halting the firing of crude missiles at Israeli towns by Palestinian militants in Gaza -- have claimed dozens of lives by the counts of Palestinians and human rights groups.

The target of Sunday’s raid in Khan Yunis was an eight-story apartment building the army said had repeatedly been used as a sniper nest. Shortly after dawn, after soldiers spent hours laying explosive charges and herding people outside, the building was blown up. The blast sent chunks of cement flying and shot a huge plume of dust into the air.

“There were many, many attacks from that building -- 14 in the last four months,” said an army spokeswoman, Capt. Sharon Feingold. “This was a preemptive operation.”

The building’s upper floors were abandoned, both sides agreed, but Palestinians said eight families, totaling about 60 people, lived on lower floors.

“We just barely got out with our lives,” said Hani abu Akher, whose father owned the building. “We didn’t even have time to put on warm clothes. And they didn’t assemble all of us in one place, so we didn’t know if anyone had been left inside and killed.”

He said no one who had lived in the building had links to any militant group.

It was the largest single-building demolition in months in either the West Bank or the Gaza Strip.

Early in the current intifada, Israel destroyed a high-rise housing complex in Gaza that it said had been used by militants to fire rockets at Israeli troops.

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Special correspondent Fayed abu Shammalah in Khan Yunis contributed to this report.