Israeli troops killed 12 Palestinians in clashes in the Gaza Strip and occupied West Bank yesterday, medics said, including four gunmen and two civilians as tanks pushed into a central Gaza refugee camp.
The Gaza raid was part of a three-week-old offensive to recover a captured soldier and halt rocket fire.
Shooting broke out around the Maghazi Camp as Israeli troops crossed the border into the territory before dawn.
Three militants from the governing Hamas group were killed, along with one armed man from Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah faction, medics and Palestinian security sources said.
The two civilians killed included a 16-year-old boy.
Later in the day, Israel killed three Palestinians in Gaza in what the army called two air strikes against militants. Medics did not specify if the dead, including a woman, were armed.
More than 60 Palestinians, including 10 children, were wounded in Gaza clashes yesterday, medics said. Gaza has been under siege since gunmen captured an Israeli soldier in a raid over the border on June 25th.
Around 100 Palestinians, more than half of them militants, have been killed in the offensive. Israeli aircraft have bombarded buildings of the Hamas-led Palestinian government and knocked out bridges, roads and a power plant.
In the West Bank, troops backed by armoured vehicles surrounded a Palestinian security compound in the city of Nablus and killed three armed men of Mr Abbas's Fatah faction, medical personnel said.