GAZA CITY, 30 September 2006 — The Israeli military killed two teenage Palestinians in the northern Gaza Strip yesterday, sources here said.

“Two martyrs arrived to the hospital badly lacerated as a direct result of their injuries from an Israeli missile fired from a plane close to Beit Hanoun,” Sayid Gouda, deputy director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital, said.

They had been walking close to the entrance to the town of Beit Hanoun when they were struck with a missile fired from an Israeli drone, witnesses said.

A medical source later named them as brothers Anwar, 14 and Hamam Hamdan, 16.

An Israeli Army spokeswoman confirmed an attack against two Palestinians who she said came to collect rocket launchers in the northern Gaza Strip, from where five rockets were launched toward Israel during the week. “We identified hitting them,” she said, but denied the attack was from the air. “It was a ground force, but I can’t elaborate,” she said.

Meanwhile, around 20,000 Palestinians demonstrated in a Gaza refugee camp yesterday in support of the Hamas-led government as the embattled Cabinet marked six months in office. Thousands of men, women and children gathered in the impoverished Hamas bastion of the Jabaliya refugee camp amid a sea of the Islamist movement’s green banners, children decked out in green and homemade placards. “We support the Palestinian government and (Prime Minister Ismail) Haniyeh specifically to send a message to the world that we are prepared to continue our resistance,” Mohammed Abu Askar, a Hamas official, said. “We will die of hunger before we compromise the principles of the Palestinian cause,” he added.

The European Union and United States suspended direct aid after Hamas took office in March owing to its status, in their eyes, as a terrorist organization and because of its refusal to change its hard-line stance. An ensuing financial crisis, exacerbated by an Israeli military offensive in the Gaza Strip and closures have seen living conditions plummet.

Whipping up the crowd, Hamas spokesman and MP Mushir Al-Masri lashed out at “schemers” whom he charged were trying to bring down the government that he vowed would remain in office “until the end of its mandate” in 2010.

He beseeched God to help “against Israel, those who recognize Israel and those who call on us to recognize Israel.” “Even if it kills us, we will not recognize Israel and not renounce our principles,” the MP added, going on to slam the Western boycott.

“The enemy, the American administration and the unjust world have imposed a financial and political siege on us, without mentioning the internal plot being woven against us,” he said in a thinly veiled allusion to Fatah.

He also hit out at the “maleficent entourage” of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, accusing his collaborators of “sowing ill-feeling to put pressure on the government.”

Efforts to form a Palestinian unity government, seen as key to solving an unprecedented crisis, are in jeopardy over entrenched differences with Hamas, a Fatah party spokesman said yesterday.

— With input from agencies