AFP

Israeli killed by Gaza mortar bomb: medics

Fri May 9, 5:13 PM

JERUSALEM (AFP) - An Israeli man was killed on Friday by a mortar bomb fired from the Gaza Strip into southern Israel, police said.

Later Friday evening two Palestinians were killed and four injured in an Israeli air-raid near Rafah at the southern end of the Gaza strip, according to Palestinian doctors and Hamas.

Medical sources had earlier said the Israeli victim was a woman.

The victim, hit on a street in the kibbutz of Kfar Aza near the Gaza border, was the 10th Israeli to die in the past six years by mortar fire from the impoverished strip.

The Rafah bombing was aimed at a police station occupied by Hamas, according to the Palestinian sources, who did not say if the victims had been Hamas members.

The military wing of the Islamist Hamas movement, which ousted forces loyal to Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas from the territory nearly 11 months ago, said it was behind Friday's attack on Israel.

"The Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades fired three 120 mm mortar bombs at the Kfar Aza settlement," it said in a statement.

Meanwhile an Islamic Jihad militant wounded in an Israeli air raid near Jabaliya in northern Gaza on Thursday has died in hospital, a Palestinian medic said on Friday.

Since Israel and the Palestinians relaunched formal peace talks in November at least 457 people have been killed, most of them Gaza militants, according to an AFP count.

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