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Israeli army kills 7 militants
27/02/2008 16:01 - (SA)
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| Militants managed to flee this car after an Israeli missile strike in Khan Younis southern Gaza Strip. (Eyad Baba, AP)
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Jeffrey Heller
Gaza - The Israeli army killed at least six Palestinian militants in Gaza and one in the occupied West Bank on Wednesday, including Hamas men who Gaza residents said had recently returned from training in Syria or Iran.
Five of the militants, senior members of the Islamist Hamas movement that controls the Gaza Strip, were killed when the van in which they were travelling was attacked from the air near the southern town of Khan Younis, medical officials said.
Local residents who knew the men said some of them had undergone training in Syria or Iran and returned home after Hamas breached the Gaza Strip's border with Egypt in defiance of an Israeli blockade of the territory of 1.5 million people.
Abu Ubaida, spokesperson of Hamas's Izz el-Deen al-Qassam Brigades, denied they had travelled outside the Gaza Strip.
Egypt closed the border, at Rafah, about two weeks after the breach, but allowed Palestinians who had crossed into its territory to go back to the Gaza Strip.
In the West Bank city of Nablus, Israeli undercover forces killed one militant and wounded and detained four others, a Palestinian official said.
The Israeli army gave no immediate details about what it described as a routine operation.
Israel's military intelligence chief said on Tuesday that dozens of Gaza militants who had gone "primarily to Syria but also to Iran for training in various areas of terror expertise" had taken advantage of the open Rafah border to return home.
An Israeli army spokesperson said the air strike was a joint operation by the military and the Shin Bet intelligence service.
Israel frequently carries out raids and air strikes in Gaza in a declared bid to curb cross-border rocket attacks by militants.
But Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri called the strike on the van an Israeli "assassination" of senior members of the group's armed wing and said they had not been on an operational mission.
A militant from the Islamic Jihad group was killed in a separate air attack east of Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, medical workers said.
- Reuters
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