An Israeli air strike killed three Palestinians in the northern Gaza Strip yesterday shortly after two rockets were fired into Israel from the area, Palestinian doctors said.
The Israeli army said it had targeted militants who had launched the rockets. They had hit the southern city of Ashkelon just as Israel's truce with Lebanese Hizbullah guerrillas took hold. One person was lightly wounded by a rocket, police said.
The Palestinian doctors said the three people killed in the Israeli air strike were civilians and that one militant and two other civilians were wounded.
Condemning the killing, Palestinian prime minister Ismail Haniyeh, a leader of the Hamas Islamist group that has sworn to destroy Israel, urged the world to focus again on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict following the truce in Lebanon.
"The Palestinian cause is the fundamental cause in the region," Mr Haniyeh said in a statement. "Calm, stability and peace cannot be achieved in the region unless the Palestinian people regain their rights."
An Israeli offensive in Gaza to recover a captured soldier and stop Palestinians firing rockets has been overshadowed by the war with Hizbullah, which has fired thousands of missiles during the conflict since July 12th.
The Israeli army said the rockets fired from Gaza yesterday were similar to many of those used by Hizbullah. Palestinian militants have rarely fired such rockets before, relying on their home-made Qassams.
Later yesterday, Palestinian gunmen kidnapped two foreign journalists working for the Fox News television channel in Gaza.
A witness, a Palestinian who worked with the two journalists, said one of them, a producer, was an American, and the other, whose nationality he did not know, was a cameraman.
Fox confirmed two employees had been abducted. It said it did not know who seized them, but that "negotiations were under way to secure their release".
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the abduction.