GAZA CITY/RAMALLAH, 21 December 2007 — Israeli tanks and troops backed by helicopter gunships raided the central Gaza Strip yesterday, killing at least seven Palestinian fighters, Palestinian sources and hospital officials said. They said Israeli forces operating east of Maghazi refugee camp, a few hundred meters from Gaza’s boundary fence, exchanged fire with groups of fighters.
Scores of other Palestinians, including a 7-year-old boy, a woman and a Reuters Television sound operator, Nihad Odehtallah, were wounded. The Islamic Jihad militant group and ruling Hamas faction each claimed two of the dead men as their own.
Odehtallah was taken to hospital with a bullet wound to his left thigh and was sent home after treatment. “The bullet went in and out. There was no fracture or vascular injury,” said a doctor at the facility. Odehtallah said he and other journalists were near an ambulance when gunfire erupted. “I didn’t see who shot me. I couldn’t identify who was firing,” he said.
“The ambulances rushed to the scene to evacuate the casualties but the Israeli troops opened intensive fire toward them preventing them of achieving the job. Four Palestinians were killed and seven others were wounded in the Israeli offensive,” Dr. Mouawiya Hasnin, director of Palestinian emergency services, told Arab News.
The Islamic Jihad movement said that three of the dead men were members of the group, while Al-Naser Brigades, the armed wing of the Popular Resistance Committee, said that one of its members had been killed during the invasion.
Israeli military sources said that the troops operating east of Al-Maghazi camp, a few hundred meters inside Gaza’s border, fired on a group of fighters, killing three and wounded several others. The sources added that a soldier was lightly wounded during the military operation.
Meanwhile, the chief Israeli intelligence officer Brig. Gen. Yuval Halamish yesterday said that Israel’s ability to counter and deal with the threat of Qassam rockets fired by Palestinian armed groups from the Gaza Strip against Jewish border towns is limited and almost nonexistent. Halamish added that sometimes luck plays more of a factor when facing the Qassam rockets than Israel’s military capabilities.
“This is a close threat that has an impact on the home front as well as the national morale,” Halamish said at a conference in Tel Aviv University on the use of electro-optics on the future battlefield. “Our ability to deal with this threat is difficult until being almost impossible in certain places.”
Halamish accused Iran and Syria of transferring know-how to the Palestinian fighters in the Gaza Strip and that the characteristics of warfare in Gaza today were similar to those used against the Israeli forces by the Hezbollah in Lebanon and against American troops in Iraq.
