GAZA CITY, 30 August 2007 — Israeli fire killed three Palestinian children and wounded one of their cousins yesterday as they played in a field in the northern Gaza Strip at the tail end of their summer holidays.
Yahya Ramadan Ghazal, 12, and his cousin Mahmoud Moussa Ghazal, 10, were killed when Israeli artillery fire from across the border slammed into a field east of Jabaliya refugee camp, witnesses and a medical official said.
A nine-year-old cousin, Sara Suleiman Ghazal was critically wounded in the incident and rushed to the Kamal Radwan Hospital in nearby Beit Lahiya where she died later, a medical official said.
A fourth child suffered less serious injuries in the attack, the sources said.
“We identified and fired at several rocket launchers aimed at Israel in the Beit Hanoun industrial zone,” an Israeli Army spokeswoman said.
“We also identified several suspicious looking people fiddling with the rocket launchers before we fired. The army regrets terror organizations’ cynical use of children,” she added. Israel said Palestinian fighters in Gaza launched three rockets toward the Jewish state yesterday, but no impacts were recorded.
Israel has waged regular strikes and incursions against the densely packed Gaza Strip ever since Hamas, the country’s sworn enemy, took armed control of the impoverished territory in mid-June.
Fighters frequently use rural areas of northern Gaza to fire rockets into Israel and their launch sites are frequent targets of Israeli fire. Yesterday’s deaths bring to 5,846 the number of people killed since the start of the second Palestinian uprising in September 2000, the vast majority of them Palestinians, according to an AFP count.
Last November, 19 Palestinians, mostly women and children, were killed when Israeli shells slammed into their homes in Beit Hanoun in a botched strike during a ground incursion into the northern Gaza Strip.
