Gaza City: At least eight Palestinians have been killed after Israeli forces launched air strikes across the Gaza Strip, a day after Hamas militants detonated explosives-laden vehicles at a border crossing.

Two more Palestinians were killed and three wounded during a raid late yesterday in Rafah, in the south of the Gaza strip, bringing the total number of dead to eight, according to medical sources and witnesses.

They were killed in an air-to-ground missile strike, the sources said. An Israeli military source confirmed the attack, saying it was aimed at a "group of armed men."

But Palestinian medical sources said one of the dead was a civilian. Six Palestinian fighters, all members of Hamas, the Islamist movement that violently seized Gaza last year and that refuses to recognise Israel's right to exist, were killed in air raids early yesterday.

Israel began air attacks against militants on Saturday after they detonated two booby-trapped vehicles disguised as Israeli military jeeps at the Kerem Shalom border crossing used to deliver humanitarian supplies to Gaza, whose economy is crippled by an Israeli blockade.

Thirteen Israeli soldiers were wounded in Saturday's attack, which Israeli Major General Yoav Galant described as the "most ambitious launched against our troops" since the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005.

The jeeps and an armoured vehicle approached the border under the cover of fog and mortar fire. The Israeli army said it foiled an attempt to detonate the third vehicle and killed four "terrorists" who were in it.
Source : PTI