THE MIDDLE EAST: Eight Palestinians were killed and over 40 injured when Israeli tanks fired several shells yesterday in the southern Gaza Strip, hitting homes in the Rafah refugee camp in what the army said was a response to rocket fire on its forces from a cluster of homes.
Among the dead were three children and two women, and many of the injured, witnesses said, were hit while in their homes. Also injured were students who were emerging from a nearby school at around 3 p.m. yesterday when the shelling took place.
The army said the violence in Rafah yesterday erupted when Palestinian militants fired machine guns and a rocket-propelled grenade at an Israeli army bulldozer erecting an embankment to better protect troops. Camp residents, however, said no rockets had been fired, and that youths had thrown rocks and bottles at the soldiers.
Ambulances sped through the camp's narrow alleyways in an effort to evacuate the wounded to a local hospital.
"I was cooking for my children when suddenly there was the sound of a tank shelling and there were explosions all around," said one woman injured by the tank fire. "One tank shell hit the house. When I started leaving the house, another shell hit it and I was injured."
Palestinian officials accused Israel of perpetrating a "massacre". While the army expressed regret over the killing of civilians, spokesman Lt Col Olivier Rafowicz said that "terrorists in the Rafah area operate amid the civilians".
In a meeting yesterday with the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, who was on a visit to Washington, the US Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, asked the Israeli leader for an explanation of what had happened in Rafah. In recent weeks, Mr Powell has expressed concern on a number of occasions over the growing number of Palestinian civilians killed by Israeli fire in the Occupied Territories.
Many of the civilian casualties have been in the Gaza Strip, where the Israeli military has stepped up its actions against the militant Islamic Hamas movement. Fourteen Palestinians were killed in a raid by the military ten days ago in the town of Khan Younis in the Strip. Palestinian officials said most of those killed were civilians, while Israel claimed almost all were gunmen firing at troops.
Rafah, which is located near the Israel-Egyptian border, is a militant stronghold and has been a flashpoint of clashes between Israeli troops and Palestinian gunmen since the start of the intifada uprising two years ago The army has levelled dozens of homes to create a stretch of no-man's land between its outpost at the edge of Rafah, which comes under almost nightly fire, and the homes in the camp.
Palestinian Cabinet Minister Saeb Erekat decried the Rafah killings, saying that every time Israeli and Palestinian officials get together to hold talks, "a few hours later the Israeli army responds with massive firepower." Mr. Erekat was referring to talks he held late Wednesday night in Jerusalem with Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. In the first high-level contacts between the sides in a month, the two men discussed a possible Israeli troop withdrawal from the West Bank town of Hebron. Also on the agenda was the transfer to the Palestinian Authority of close to $500 million in tax revenues on Palestinian imports, which Israel has frozen since the violence erupted two years ago.