OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 26 September 2003 — Israeli soldiers raided the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the early hours yesterday, killing six Palestinians including a three-year-old girl. One Israeli soldier was also killed.
A column of about 35 Israeli armored vehicles including tanks, backed up by a helicopter gunship, pushed into central Gaza’s Al-Bureij refugee camp in a predawn raid. The incursion sparked a fierce gunbattle that left the Israeli soldier and two Palestinians from the armed wings of Hamas and Islamic Jihad dead.
Another six soldiers and at least one other Palestinian were wounded in the operation.
The Israeli army said it found homemade Qassam rockets and mortars which have been used to launch attacks across the border and on Jewish settlements.
A three-year-old Palestinian girl also died of “fright” during the large-scale operation, family and hospital sources said.
Israeli troops staged another early morning raid into the southern West Bank city of Hebron and killed two Islamic Jihad members. The two were shot dead during an exchange of fire in the house where they were holed up, Palestinians said. A third Palestinian was seriously wounded in the gunbattle in the town, where eight senior members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad have been killed over the past two months.
In another incident, a Palestinian was shot dead by Israeli troops near the Jewish settlement of Morag in the southern Gaza Strip.
Following a meeting on Wednesday with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Israel’s foreign minister, Silvan Shalom, said: “I think Arafat takes us more seriously. We can see that, in the last few days, he is trying to ask Hamas and other extremists not to carry out more attacks against us.”
