BUREIJ, Gaza Strip, 4 March 2003 — Israeli troops killed eight Palestinians yesterday while storming a Gaza Strip refugee camp where they seized a founder of Hamas and demolished houses.
Palestinian hospital officials said a 33-year-old pregnant woman was killed by falling debris when the army blew up a house, and gunfire killed a 13-year-old boy.
The Palestinian Authority charged that the incursion into Bureij refugee camp signaled an Israeli intention to step up military operations in the Gaza Strip while world attention was focused on a possible US-led war on Iraq.
The dead in Bureij also included a policeman, a Hamas member and two civilians, security and hospital officials said. It was not clear if two other men killed in the raid had been armed.
At least 40 Palestinians were wounded in the operation, which began when undercover troops infiltrated the camp and was followed by a tank incursion. The raid ended after dawn.
In the West Bank, soldiers shot dead a Palestinian who tried to bypass a checkpoint on the road between the cities of Nablus and Ramallah, witnesses said. The army had no immediate comment.
The operation in Bureij centered on the arrest of Mohammed Taha, 67, one of the original political leaders of Hamas when it was founded in 1987, and three of his sons, witnesses said.
“The soldiers crept into our house without anyone knowing. They beat my father and took him into custody as he fainted,” Taha’s son Hassan told Reuters.
Hours after the Bureij operation, a makeshift Qassam rocket fired in the Gaza Strip landed at a highway junction near the ranch of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and another slammed into the southern town of Sderot down the road. No one was injured.
