Madison-Rafah Journal

AFP, 28 Apr 2008

BEIT HANUN, Gaza Strip (AFP) — Four children, aged one to five, and their mother were among seven people killed by Israeli forces in Gaza Monday as Palestinian factions headed to Egypt for talks on a possible truce.

The four siblings — aged one, three, four and five — were killed when a missile hit their home in the town of Beit Hanun, and their mother died later of her wounds, doctors at the Kamal Radwan hospital said.

"I left the house just moments before to look for one of my children. I heard the sound of the explosion," said their 70-year-old father Ahmed Abu Maateq.

"They had been eating breakfast and my wife had been holding our youngest child in her hands," he said as he looked down at the blood, flesh and spilled milk splashed across the wreckage.

His wife and six children were in the courtyard in their pyjamas when the missile slammed into the house, he said. The remaining two children were hospitalised.

"I hope to God that the same thing that happened to me happens to whoever fired that missile at my house, that what happened to my wife and children happens to his family," Abu Maateq said, his eyes red with pain and anger.

Islamic Jihad fighters had clashed with Israeli troops near the house which is close to Gaza's border with Israel, Palestinian security officials said, and the group said one of its fighters was killed in roughly the same area.

The army said one Israeli soldier was lightly wounded in the fighting.

A seventh man was shot dead by Israeli forces near Beit Hanun Monday evening, according to Dr. Muawiya Hassanein, the head of Gaza emergency services.

Another four Palestinian militants were wounded in an afternoon air strike in northern Gaza, he said.

Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak vowed the military would continue to target Hamas across the Gaza Strip, and said "Hamas is responsible for some of the civilian casualties".

The Israeli army later said the explosion that killed the Abu Maateq family was the result of a strike on Palestinian militants carrying explosives.

"The IDF (army) targeted from the air two Palestinian gunmen" who were approaching soldiers "while carrying large bags on their backs," the army said in a statement after conducting an inquiry into the incident.

"A big explosion erupted on the scene, following the attack against the two, indicating the presence of bombs and explosives in the gunmen's bags," it said.

Palestinian witnesses disputed that account, insisting that the house was more than a kilometre from the scene of the clashes and that the explosion was caused by an Israeli missile fired by an aerial drone.

No armed men were killed or wounded in the explosion at the house, and an AFP correspondent who arrived at the scene shortly after the strike saw shrapnel from an Israeli missile amid the wreckage inside.

Senior Hamas leader Ismail Haniya said the "massacre" was part of Israel's "constant attempts to destroy any regional or international effort to lift the siege and end the violence."

Palestinian militants meanwhile fired at least 13 rockets at southern Israel, damaging a house in the hard-hit town of Sderot near the border, the army said. No one was wounded in the attack.

At least 444 people, most of them Palestinians, have been killed since the restart of formal peace talks under US auspices at an international conference in November, according to an AFP tally.

Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, currently in Jordan, condemned the attack in a statement from his office in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

"This aggression does not serve the efforts being exerted to bring about a period of calm and hinders the peace process," the statement said.

The latest clashes came as delegations from several Palestinian factions headed to Cairo to discuss a possible ceasefire with Israel after the Islamist Hamas movement which rules the Gaza Strip held similar talks in Egypt.

Delegations from the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) and three smaller leftist groups crossed into Egypt via the Rafah border crossing with Gaza.

Islamic Jihad, which has carried out numerous rocket attacks on southern Israel, planned to send a delegation from Damascus to Cairo on Monday night.

Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman will host the factions on Tuesday and Wednesday in a bid to draft a common position on the truce proposal.