GAZA, 16 November — Israeli tanks and troops raided two Palestinian-ruled towns in the Gaza Strip and West Bank yesterday, killing one Palestinian and wounding at least 15, witnesses and medical officials said. The victim, Suheil Abu Saleh, 27, was hit in the head. Seven others were wounded in separate incidents.
In one incident four members of a Palestinian family were wounded, one of them seriously, late yesterday, when their taxi was hit by Israeli machine-gun fire near an Israeli military checkpoint in Khan Yunis, hospital sources said.
The occupants were shot as the taxi was traveling near the Gush Khatif bloc of Jewish settlements, the sources said.
Earlier Israeli troops wounded three Palestinians, including a 42-year-old woman, when they opened fire in Rafah, near the Egyptian border, the sources said.
Palestinian security sources also said the army closed the road between Deir El-Balah and Khan Yunis, and that its tanks and jeeps had made an incursion of 100 meters into Deir El-Balah.
Two Palestinians were also hurt in shooting between gunmen and Palestinian security forces in the West Bank city of Jenin, where at least 2,500 people protested the arrest of an activist by President Yasser Arafat’s security forces.
The violence, shortly before a visit to the Middle East by European Union leaders, dealt a new setback to hopes of an end to more than 13 months of Israeli-Palestinian violence in which almost 900 people have been killed. The army entered the Khan Yunis refugee camp in southern Gaza late Wednesday night and destroyed 30 buildings, witnesses said.
“It was a night of absolute terror. We had to wake up the children and move them to a friend’s house further inside the camp,” said Khan Yunis resident Fatin Meqdad, who spent hours after the raid trying to calm down her six children.
