Israeli air strike kills Hamas commander
GAZA CITY (AFP) — An Israeli air strike killed the Hamas military commander for the Gaza-Egypt border town of Rafah on Friday, the latest in a spate of deadly raids on the Islamist-controlled Gaza Strip.
Mohammed Harb was killed along with one of his lieutenants when an Israeli missile struck their car, medical sources said.
During Thursday night, two other members of the military wing of the Islamist Hamas movement which controls Gaza were also killed when two Israeli missiles slammed into their jeep.
Over the past 10 days, Israel has killed 45 Palestinians, most of them militants, in ground and air attacks on Gaza. In turn, armed groups have fired some 200 rockets or mortar rounds into southern Israel, slightly wounding 10 people.
An Israeli army spokeswoman confirmed the latest raids saying that they had hit "Palestinians implicated in acts of terrorism."
Harb was suspected of involvement in rocket and mortar fire against southern Israel and preparing other attacks, she said.
Military sources, cited by public radio, said Harb was also suspected of involvement in a deadly cross-border raid from Gaza in June 2006 in which an Israeli soldier was captured. He remains held despite Israeli efforts to find him.
Harb commanded Hamas forces in the divided Egyptian frontier town of Rafah where militants blew up sections of the border fence on Tuesday night allowing hundreds of thousands of Gazans to pour across over the past few days.
The action enabled the territory's 1.5 million inhabitants to stock up on basic supplies in defiance of a complete lockdown imposed by the Israeli defence ministry last week.
In the West Bank, an 18-year-old Palestinian was shot dead by Israeli troops that had entered the village of Beit Omar to search the houses of two militants that were killed on Thursday as they attacked a Jewish settlement south of Jerusalem, witnesses said.
An army spokesman told AFP that troops had opened fire after a group of Palestinians who were hurling rocks at the force refused to disperse.
In a separate incident on Thursday, an Israeli policeman was shot dead by suspected Palestinian militants in annexed Arab east Jerusalem.
A second border policeman was seriously wounded in the shooting at a checkpoint in the Jerusalem refugee camp of Shoafat, medical sources said.
It was the first attack in territory Israel regards as part of the Jewish state in several years. Israel annexed east Jerusalem shortly after capturing it in the 1967 Middle East war in a move never recognized by the international community.
Police and soldiers launched a massive manhunt for the gunmen who also made off with the dead policeman's weapon.
Security forces across east Jerusalem were on high alert for the Muslim day of rest on Friday for fear of protests against the lockdown on Gaza.
Israel blocked access to the Al-Aqsa mosque compound -- Islam's third holiest site -- to men aged under 40.
"We have deployed reinforcements to deal with all eventualities around the main prayers and have increased security in markets and other public places for fear of attack," police spokesman Shmulik Ben Rubi told AFP.
Palestinian security sources named the two militants killed as they attacked the West Bank settlement as Mohammed Sabarneh, 21, and his cousin Mahmud Sabarneh, 20, from Beit Ommar, near the flashpoint city of Hebron.
Both were members of the Islamist Hamas movement which controls Gaza, the sources said. They had recently been released by Israel after two years in detention.
The latest deaths bring to 6,103 the number of people killed in Israeli-Palestinian violence since 2000, the vast majority of them Palestinians, according to an AFP toll.
