GAZA CITY, 28 July 2006 — Three Palestinians, including a 75-year-old woman, were killed in Israeli gunfire in Gaza yesterday, a day after the coastal strip suffered one of the deadliest days since the start of a massive Israeli offensive a month ago.
The woman was killed when an artillery shell slammed into her home near the Jabaliya refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, hospital officials said. In addition, a 16-year-old boy and a 23-year-old man were killed east of Gaza City. Nineteen other Palestinians were wounded. On Wednesday, the Israeli military killed 24 Palestinians.
In Rome, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said yesterday that the release of an Israeli soldier captured in Gaza could be “imminent.”
“With regard to the issue of the captured Israeli soldier, I have reiterated that there are ongoing efforts that lead us to believe in an imminent solution,” Abbas said after a meeting with Italian Premier Romano Prodi.
However, sources close to the Hamas-led government denied that the release was “imminent.”
An Israeli Army spokesman said Israeli air and ground forces have been operating over the past two days in the neighborhood of Sejaiya in eastern Gaza City to search for what he called “terror infrastructure.”
Palestinian security forces said that “Israeli tanks had entered areas east of the densely-populated Jabaliya refugee camp and were also spotted some 1,500 meters inside the territory and Sejaiya.”
While world diplomats in Rome tried but failed on Wednesday to agree on calls for a cease-fire in Israel’s war in Lebanon against Hezbollah, violence raged in the narrow coastal strip.
The 24 Palestinians who died from Israeli airstrikes and artillery east and north of Gaza City included a baby and two toddlers.
At least seven of the dead were fighters, including four from the armed wing of the governing Hamas and another from the Popular Resistance Committees, two of three groups to claim the June 25 raid in which a soldier was captured.
The youngsters who were killed were a seven-month-old Palestinian girl, two three-year-old girls and a 17-year-old boy. The baby and her three-year-old sister died along with their 33-year-old mother.
President Abbas on Wednesday demanded an immediate cease-fire to Israel’s offensive, condemning what he called “unacceptable acts” and charged that “Israel is clearly violating the Geneva Conventions” in attacking civilian areas.
Abbas on Wednesday began a tour of several Arab states for talks on the situation in the Palestinian territories, his spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeinah said.
“President Abbas will meet King Abdallah of Jordan, Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Saudi King Abdullah,” he said. He will “bring his Arab brothers up to date on the situation in the Palestinian territories and in particular on the escalation of Israeli attacks against the Palestinian people,” he said.
Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, whose Hamas-led government has been directly targeted in the offensive, warned that Israel was responsible for the fate of its missing soldier. “Military force will not manage to break the will of our people,” he declared on Wednesday during a graduation ceremony at the Islamic University, which was itself bombed by Israel on grounds that it was used to plan “terror attacks.”
— With input from agencies
