killed at least 14 Palestinians in an apparent response to militants who tried to attack Israeli soldiers at Gaza’s border a day earlier, Palestinian sources and news reports said.
Palestinian officials described the attack as a "massacre" after medics said that half of the dead were civilians, including three boys. However hospital officials also stressed there were militants among those who died, including members of Hamas which has killed scores of Israelis in suicide bombings and other attacks in a Palestinian revolt that erupted in 2000.
"It’s a big massacre today against our people. We call on the whole world to condemn it," Abdallah Abu Samhadama, Palestinian governor of central Gaza, told journalists after the overnight gun battles, which also wounded about 70 people.
MORE FIGHTING
Fighting has intensified in the Gaza Strip in recent weeks as each side tries to make a planned Israeli withdrawal from the area look like a victory, Euronews television commented.
The Reuters news agency quoted Israeli military sources as claiming that the raid was a "pinpoint operation" against "terror groups" which had been escalating gun, mortar and rocket attacks on Jewish settlements in Gaza and regions on either side of the border with Israel for months.
Palestinian residents said "fierce fighting" erupted between the troops and Palestinian gunmen as the soldiers began house-to-house searches for wanted militants, the Voice of America (VOA) reported. But Israeli army officials claimed that Palestinian fighters had opened fire on the troops and that soldiers fired in response to those attacks.
UNDER ATTACK
Israel’s army also said that they had come under attack from Palestinians who fired anti-tank missiles and detonated explosives, VOA said. The raids came after Palestinians tried to bomb the Erez border terminal between Israel and Gaza Saturday, March 6, in what Hamas said was a coordinated attack between different militant groups using jeeps disguised as Israeli military vehicles.
Six Palestinians died in the failed attempt, the Red Crescent Society said but no Israelis were reported inured or killed. The crossing point, used by Palestinians to reach jobs in an adjacent industrial zone, has been attacked twice in the past two months by Palestinian groups.
Israeli security forces have imposed a closure on the West Bank and Gaza Strip since Thursday night that will last until Monday night, which marks the end of the Purim holiday weekend, reported the Bloomberg news agency and The Jerusalem Post newspaper.
STATE OF ALERT
"We’ve been on a high state of alert because of the Purim holiday," Israeli police spokesman Gil Kleiman told Bloomberg in a phone interview. "There are a lot of people out on the streets for the holiday." There has been concern among Jews and Christian groups supporting Israel that suicide attacks will continue despite the ongoing construction of a controversial security barrier between Israeli and Palestinian lands.
This weekend a Chicago-based organization of Jews and evangelical Christians announced it had donated $2 million to Israel to step up security and make it more difficult for Palestinian suicide bombers to launch attacks. The Chicago Tribune news paper said the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, which claims 300,000 supporters in the United States and Canada, made the donation to Israel’s Ministry of Internal Security earlier in the week.
Israeli officials say the money will be used to deploy 1,000 security personnel with metal detectors on 1,000 buses, which have been often the target of attacks. The fellowship hopes to raise another $5.2 million for similar security measures on thousands of additional buses, said Diane Dubey, a spokeswoman for the 20-year-old organization, which has 30 evangelical and 20 Jewish members, the Chicago Tribune news paper reported.
