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Israel strikes at Hamas after rocket attacks

Israeli planes pounded Hamas targets early yesterday, bringing the toll in the past 24 hours of raids to 11 Palestinians killed and dozens wounded, as it stepped deeper into fighting between the Islamic militants and rival Fatah fighters of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Hamas continued to lob rockets into southern Israel yesterday, with three falling in the town of Sderot. Paramedics said three people were slightly injured by shrapnel and others treated for shock.

In one of yesterday's strikes, Israeli aircraft fired missiles east of Gaza City, killing five Palestinians, at least three of them Hamas militants, and wounding six people, Hamas and local doctors said. The military said the target was a Hamas headquarters building.

Two other strikes followed, but there was no word of any casualties, the Palestinian doctors said. The army said it struck at a squad which fired rockets into Israel.

Those strikes, a series of Israeli air attacks on Thursday, and the movement of tanks a few hundred meters into the northern Gaza Strip, followed days of Hamas rocket barrages into Israel.

Street fighting between the Palestinian factions that has gripped Gaza since the weekend calmed under a truce agreement, but clashes on Thursday still killed at least four people -- a day after 22 died in the worst battles during a year of factional bloodshed.

The two sides exchanged bursts of automatic weapons fire around the Islamic University in downtown Gaza city yesterday, and one person was wounded but it was not immediately known from which side.

There was no sign of any Israeli military buildup that would indicate plans for a serious intervention into chaotic Gaza, though a few tanks and soldiers moved just across the Gaza border. Israel's government said its attacks were intended solely to discourage rocket attacks on southern Israel.

"Israel will take every defensive measure to stop these rocket attacks. We will defend our citizens against the rockets, against the weapons, against the Iranian-backed Hamas who are attacking Israel," government spokeswoman Miri Eisen said.

Analysts said Israeli policymakers were likely trying to walk a narrow line to avoid uniting Palestinian factions into a common front against Israel, but Infrastructure Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, a retired general, said Israel could not stand idly by while Palestinian rockets continued to fall.

Hamas Web sites, radio and TV carried accusations that forces loyal to Abbas were working with Israel -- a charge dismissed as "absurd" by a Fatah spokesman.

Although Israel said it wasn't taking sides, the airstrikes did make it harder for Hamas gunmen to move around and that could help Fatah's fighters, who appeared to have been outfought in the latest round of battles.

In Washington, US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Israel had shown "great restraint" in exercising its right to self defense and warned Hamas it would never achieve a Palestinian state unless it chose peace and worked with Fatah.

"They're not going to see it by launching Qassam rockets into Israel. They're not going to see it by attacking the legitimate security forces of the Palestinian Authority. They're not going to see it by sending young people armed with suicide vests to blow up other Israeli youngsters," McCormack said.

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