An Israeli missile struck a house in the northern Gaza Strip yesterday, killing two Palestinian militants, Palestinian witnesses and medics said.
They said the air strike targeted the home of a member of al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, part of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah movement. It followed a Palestinian suicide bombing that killed five Israelis at a shopping mall on Monday.
The two militants were identified by medics as Iyad Qadas and Iyad al-Najr, leaders of al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and involved in rocket attacks on Israel.
Another militant was also wounded, the medics and witnesses said, as well as a four-year-old girl and five other Palestinians.
The three militants were believed to have assumed the leadership of the brigades in the northern Gaza Strip after an Israeli missile attack killed the group's chief, Hassan al-Madhoun, on Nov. 1.
The missile was part of an Israeli warplane and artillery attack on rocket launch sites in Gaza yesterday.
The new violence tested an already shaky ceasefire and a peace process on hold as Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon faced a campaign for re-election in a March poll.
The Israeli army said its aircraft had fired the missile to cut off an access road to sites from where militants had launched rockets at Israeli towns since a senior militant was killed in an Israeli air strike on his car on Wednesday.
The Popular Resistance Committees had vowed revenge for the death of field commander Mahmud el-Arqan, 29, on Wednesday's raid in the Gaza town of Rafah. Ten other people were wounded in that attack, including three children struck by shrapnel.
"Israel has opened the gates to hell by assassinating one of our leaders," said Abu Abir, a Popular Committees spokesman.
Israel also besieged a building near the West Bank town of Jenin and arrested two Islamic Jihad militants there, in a further retaliatory measure approved by the security Cabinet after Monday's bomb blast killed five in the town of Netanya.
The bombing had been claimed by Islamic Jihad, a different group from that to which el-Arqan belonged. Israeli military sources said he had collaborated with Islamic Jihad in launching attacks against Israelis.
Islamic Jihad called the bombing a response to previous Israeli attacks on its members.
The latest fighting has further diminished world hopes that Israel's withdrawal of forces from the Gaza Strip in September would lead to a quick resumption of peace talks.
Ahead of a national election on March 28, Sharon has to face down rightist political foes who accuse him of surrendering to the militants by relinquishing land Israel had captured in a 1967 Middle East War.
In other new, a Palestinian stabbed an Israeli to death at a military checkpoint in the occupied West Bank yesterday, Israel Radio said.
The Israeli was stabbed in the neck and the attacker apprehended at the Qalandiya checkpoint between Jerusalem and the West Bank city of Ramallah, the radio report said.
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