GAZA CITY (AFP) — Eleven Palestinians, including a six-month-old baby, were killed in Israeli attacks on Wednesday while Palestinian rockets killed an Israeli in a sharp escalation of violence.
Following a day of unrest, Israeli helicopters launched a night raid on the Hamas interior ministry in Gaza, firing three missiles and seriously damaging the five-story building, witnesses said.
According to a hospital source, the baby was killed in the attack, with witnesses reporting damage to houses surrounding the ministry and at least 20 other casualties.
The deadliest attack occurred earlier in the day in the southern Gaza town of Khan Yunis where five Hamas fighters were killed in an Israeli army raid which also wounded one person, medical sources told AFP.
A second raid on the same site moments later injured another three people.
Hamas then claimed responsibility for what was the first killing of an Israeli by Gaza rocket fire since May 2007 -- before the movement seized power in Gaza in June -- saying it had been to avenge the death of its militants.
Israel in turn launched further deadly air strikes following the Israeli fatality caused by a rocket that slammed into a college on the outskirts of the southern Israeli town of Sderot.
Some 50 rockets were fired from Gaza including one that exploded in a hospital parking lot just outside Ashkelon without wounding anyone, the army said.
"The attacks by Hamas against Israeli civilians from areas in which Palestinian civilians live is a crime against humanity that affects Israelis as well as Palestinians," Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Arye Mekel said.
Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak visited the scene of the Israeli casualty later at night, a government statement said. National radio said Barak warned during his visit that the pounding would now intensify.
Two Palestinians, whose identities were not immediately known, were killed in an afternoon air strike on a Gaza City neighbourhood from which rockets had just been fired, witnesses said.
Another air strike just after nightfall near a petrol station north of Gaza City killed another two Palestinians and wounded 12 others, including four children aged between six and 10, medics said.
An Israeli army spokeswoman said the strike had targeted a group about to launch rockets.
In the West Bank, undercover Israeli troops shot dead an 11th Palestinian, a militant, during an arrest raid in the town of Nablus, security and medical sources said.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, on a visit to Japan, vowed to continue operations in Gaza, where Hamas seized power in June after routing forces loyal to Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas.
"Hamas must bear responsibility for its actions," Olmert told reporters in Tokyo.
Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri warned that the Islamic movement reserved the right "to respond by all means available" to what he called Israel's "grave escalation" of the conflict.
Another militant from the armed wing of the radical Islamic Jihad movement was killed the previous night in an air strike in the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza, Palestinian medical sources said.
The deaths brought to around 211 the number of people killed since Israel and the Palestinians resumed peace talks in November, most of them Gaza militants, according to an AFP count.
Britain called for a halt to the violence and expressed condolences for the Israeli killed in the rocket attack.
"We unreservedly condemn today's barrage of rockets on southern Israel that has left one man dead and several others injured," British minister for the Middle East Kim Howells said in a statement.
"I hope that Israel will show restraint in the face of these attacks," he added.
The violence came a day after a top UN official urged Israel, Egypt and the Palestinians to develop a new strategy to secure the lifting of Israel's punishing blockade of Gaza and an end to rocket fire.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, meanwhile, is to visit Israel and the Palestinian territories on a trip starting March 3, State Department spokesman Tom Casey told reporters in Washington on Wednesday.
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