ISRAEL: Violence raged across the occupied territories yesterday, as 11 Palestinians were killed and 25 wounded.
Israeli soldiers, backed by tanks and attack helicopters, thrust into Gaza to target Palestinian metal workshops, which, the army says, are used to make the rockets that Hamas militants fire at Israeli targets.
Hours later, in a retaliatory salvo, Hamas members fired four rockets into a southern Israeli town.
The five-hour Gaza raid began around midnight on Tuesday, with some 40 tanks surging into the Shajaiyeh neighbourhood in Gaza City - a Hamas and Islamic Jihad stronghold - and the village of Tufah, in line with Israeli Prime Minister Mr Ariel Sharon's policy of stepping up strikes against the militant Hamas group.
Palestinian gunmen engaged troops in fierce street battles, as the army destroyed several metal workshops.
Israeli Col Imad Faris, the head of infantry in the area, said the army knew of "10 armed Palestinians" killed by "precise shooting by snipers".
Palestinian hospital officials, however, said four of the dead were civilians, and that seven were militants or members of the Palestinian Authority security services. The Palestinians also reported that three of those killed were crushed to death in a building that collapsed near a metal workshop demolished by the army. A 21-year-old Hamas member, they added, blew himself up near a tank.
Col Faris said the raid was meant to send a message to Hamas that it could not act unfettered in Gaza, which, unlike the West Bank, has not been reconquered by Israel. "This was a deeper operation . . . in a place they thought, they believed, that we would not be able to get to," he said. Israeli Defence Minister Mr Shaul Mofaz said the raids in the Gaza Strip would continue.
Hamas leaders vowed revenge. The movement's spiritual mentor, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, said "the Israeli enemy has lost its mind" and would be made to "pay the price sooner or later".
The response was not long in coming. Towards the afternoon, militants fired four Kassam rockets, a homemade weapon developed by Hamas, from the strip into the southern Israeli town of Sderot. A 35-year-old man was lightly injured.
In the northern West Bank town of Jenin, a member of the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, which is associated with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat's Fatah party, was killed and another four people injured when a bomb exploded inside their car.
The Al Aqsa Brigades blamed Israel for the blast.
Another two Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank city of Nablus yesterday, where the army was carrying out house-to-house searches. Palestinians said one was a 16-year-old boy throwing stones at troops, and the second a bakery worker on his way to work.
The army said the boy was shot after throwing a Molotov cocktail.