Agence France-Presse,
GAZA CITY: Israel launched two air strikes against Gaza on Sunday, killing at least two militants from the Islamic Jihad group and wounding two passers-by, medical sources said.
The first air strike, in the north of the Gaza Strip, was aimed at a group of men firing rockets at Israel in the Beit Hanun sector of the impoverished coastal strip, the sources said.
The Israeli army confirmed the air raid.
“We targeted two men firing rockets at Israel. We apparently hit them,” an army spokesman said.
Two Palestinians were wounded in a later Israeli air raid on a car travelling in Gaza City, but the vehicle's occupants escaped unscathed, medical sources and witnesses said.
Instead, two passers-by were injured in the blast, the sources said.
An Israeli military spokeswoman in Tel Aviv told AFP only that “the air force carried out a strike on Sunday evening against an Islamic Jihad militant.”
Earlier, an Israeli woman was lightly injured by a rocket attack launched by Gaza-based Palestinian militants against the southern town of Sderot, medical sources said.
Two further rockets fell on Israeli soil later on Sunday but did not cause any injuries, an Israeli military source said.
Two Hamas activists were killed early morning on the northern border of the Gaza Strip, the armed wing of the Islamist movement announced.
“Two of our fighters were killed in an exchange of fire” with the Israeli army, the Ezzedin Al-Qassam Brigades said.
Palestinian medical sources said the two men were killed near the electric fence surrounding the Gaza Strip, near Beit Lahiya.
The Israeli army confirmed the clash. A military spokesman told AFP that soldiers had spotted two armed men near the fence and opened fire on them, “killing or wounding them.”
The latest deaths bring to 5,792 the number of people who have died since the start of the second Palestinian uprising in September 2000, the vast majority of them Palestinians, according to an AFP tally.
