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Thousands flee Gaza as Israeli attacks continue

Israeli aircraft and artillery attacked Palestinian rocket launchers in the Gaza Strip yesterday, the army said, as Israel persisted in its two-week operation meant to stop the crude projectiles.

The Israeli retaliatory strikes that began mid last month have killed more than 50 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, most of them militants. Two Israelis have been killed in the barrages of more than 270 rockets, and thousands of Israelis have evacuated the southern town of Sderot in fear.

In yesterday's violence, two Palestinians were slightly injured in an Israeli artillery strike on the northern Gazan town of Beit Hanoun, Islamic Jihad said. The militant group took responsibility for firing rockets prior to the Israeli attack.

Late on Wednesday, a Palestinian rocket hit a house and power lines in Sderot, plunging several neighborhoods into darkness but causing no casualties, Israeli media reported.

Israel resolved on Wednesday to keep striking Gaza Strip rocket squads firing on Israeli border towns and insisted it wasn't negotiating a truce with radical groups.

The supreme leader of the Hamas militant group, which has been behind the latest surge in rocket attacks, vowed that attacks on Israel would continue, too.

Hamas, the senior partner in the Palestinian government, has launched most of the rockets the Israeli military says has been fired since violence flared mid last month. Two members of a Hamas rocket squad were killed in an Israeli air attack on northern Gaza before dawn on Wednesday.

Israel's Security Cabinet met on Wednesday to assess the situation and concluded that Israel's two-week-old military campaign has been effective in "relatively" reducing rocket fire, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office said in a statement.

In the middle of last month, at the height of the latest round of rocket barrages, about 38 projectiles were fired in a single day, compared with two on Tuesday, the military said.

"There are the results of the Israeli army's actions, and therefore we will continue our operations,'' Security Cabinet member Isaac Herzog told Army Radio after the meeting.

"Israel is not conducting any negotiations for a ceasefire with terror organizations," the statement from Olmert's office added.

Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal warned from his base in Damascus, Syria, that attacks on Israel would continue despite the Israeli reprisals.

"Under occupation people don't ask whether their means are effective in hurting the enemy," Khaled Mashaal told the Guardian newspaper in an interview published on Wednesday.

"The Palestinians have only modest means, so they defend themselves however they can," he said.

In addition to striking back from the air, Israel has conducted limited ground operations inside Gaza and arrested dozens of Hamas political leaders in the West Bank.

The latest cycle of violence is expected to top the agenda of Olmert's meeting next week with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, a moderate who favors peacemaking, but has been ineffective in trying to stop the militant attacks.

Abbas has proposed a truce agreement that would commit Gaza militants to halt their rocket fire for a month to permit negotiations on a more comprehensive ceasefire including the West Bank, where Israel conducts frequent arrest raids against militants.
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