Gunmen killed at least seven people and injured 30 others in attacks on vehicles in southern Israel today, and a senior Israeli official said they had infiltrated from the Gaza Strip through Egypt's Sinai desert.
Israel's military said the incident began when "terrorists shot at a bus on its way [to the city of] Eilat and then fired an anti-tank rocket at another vehicle. At the same time, a military patrol hit an explosive device".
The Israeli Embassy in Dublin said seven people were killed and 30 were wounded in the attacks.
Israeli special forces were called in and engaged the gunmen as police and military closed roads around Eilat, a popular Red Sea resort. The military said between two and four gunmen were killed. Israeli media reports said up to seven attackers were killed.
Israel responded with an air strike in the Gaza Strip that killed six Palestinians, including the leaders of a group it blamed for the violence.
Israel struck against the Popular Resistance Committees, an armed faction that often operates independently of Gaza's Hamas rulers. The Israeli military said the PRC was behind the border attack -- a charge denied by the faction.
The PRC said its commander, Kamal al-Nairab, his deputy, Immad Hammad, and three other members were killed in the Israeli air strike on a home in the southern Gaza town of Rafah.
The faction vowed revenge for the attack, which hospital officials said also killed a two-year-old son of the owner of the house.
"It was a grave terrorist incident that took place in several locations," defence minister Ehud Barak said in a statement. "It reflects the weakening of Egypt's hold in the Sinai and the broadening of activities by terror elements."
Calling the Gaza Strip, Palestinian territory controlled by Hamas Islamists and bordering the Sinai and Israel, "the source of terrorist activities", Mr Barak said: "We will act against them with full force and determination."
Mark Regev, a spokesman for prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said Israel "has specific and precise information that these terrorists who targeted Israelis today came out of the Gaza Strip".
A senior Israeli official said the gunmen, unable to cross into Israel through the heavily patrolled border with the Gaza Strip, had gone into the Sinai and then infiltrated from there into southern Israel.
Israeli officials have voiced concern that militant groups in the Sinai have been making use of a security vacuum left by the overthrow of president Hosni Mubarak in February.
The Israeli shekel fell against the dollar and stocks dipped today.
"I saw two men in fatigues shooting at me," the bus driver, Benny Bilbaski, told Israel Radio. "I saw that there were wounded on the bus but I continued to drive on, looking straight not looking right or left. Once I got a kilometre past the area and I was out of range we took care of the wounded."
Egypt, which signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, recently stepped up security activity in the Sinai.
On Tuesday, Egyptian security sources said an army crackdown on armed groups in the northern Sinai had netted four Islamist militants as they prepared to blow up a gas pipeline. A network of smuggling tunnels links the area with the Gaza Strip.
Egyptian security sources today said it was unlikely the gunmen had come from Egyptian territory.
Security patrols on the Egyptian-Israeli border had not picked up on "suspicious movements" on the Egyptian side, a source said, adding that security had been heightened on the border after news of the incident.
Reuters