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Israel military kills 4 in gaza operation { October 14 2004 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/14/international/middleeast/14mideast.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/14/international/middleeast/14mideast.html
October 14, 2004
Israeli Military Kills 4 Palestinian Militants in Gaza Operation
By GREG MYRE
JERUSALEM, Oct. 13 - The Israeli military killed four Palestinian militants on Wednesday as troops in tanks and armored vehicles pushed into another town in the northern Gaza Strip, extending a two-week-old operation aimed at silencing Palestinian rocket fire.
The town, Beit Lahiya, is adjacent to the Jabaliya refugee camp, which has been the main Israeli focus.
In sporadic clashes, soldiers shot and killed two armed members of Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades and killed two members of Hamas in separate airstrikes, according to the Israeli military and Palestinian hospital officials and witnesses.
"The expansion of the operation proves we don't mean to let up," Israel's deputy defense minister, Zeev Boim, told army radio.
But Palestinians fired two more rockets at Israeli communities just outside Gaza, though the projectiles fell harmlessly, as they usually do. An Israeli radar system, built to warn of incoming rockets, worked as intended for the first time on Wednesday, sounding a siren about 20 seconds before the rockets landed.
In the southern Gaza town of Khan Yunis, a 10-year-old Palestinian girl, Ghadeer Jaber Mokheimer, died from an Israeli gunshot wound to the abdomen suffered a day earlier. She was hit while at her desk in a school run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the agency said.
The military said soldiers fired in the area on Tuesday in response to Palestinian mortar rounds, but were not aware of hitting the girl. The military said it was investigating.
In a similar incident on Sept. 7, a 10-year-old Palestinian girl was hit by a bullet in the head at another school run by the refugee agency in Khan Yunis. She died two weeks later.
"That two young children have been shot and killed, sitting at their desks in U.N.R.W.A. schools in the last month is horrific by anyone's standards," Peter Hansen, the head of the refugee agency, said in a statement.
Also, the army on Wednesday suspended a platoon commander accused of firing shots into the body of a 13-year-old Palestinian girl who had been wounded by Israeli fire.
The girl, Iman al-Hams, was shot on Oct. 5 as she approached an Israeli military outpost in the southern town of Rafah. Soldiers suspected that she had a bomb in her bag, the military said, but she was on her way to school and was carrying only books, her family said.
The military and the soldiers at the outpost have given conflicting accounts of the shooting, and the military has ordered an investigation.
Some soldiers have told the Israeli media that the commander had walked up to the fallen girl and fired from his automatic rifle until the magazine was empty. The commander has disputed that account, media reports said. Palestinian doctors who saw the girl's body said she had been hit by at least 15 bullets.
In the West Bank town of Hebron, a senior Hamas figure, Imad Qawasmeh, stripped to his underwear and surrendered after Israeli forces surrounded a house where he had been hiding and began to tear it down.
Israel identified Mr. Qawasmeh as the local leader of the Hamas faction and said he had orchestrated multiple attacks, including a double suicide bombing on Aug. 31 that killed 16 Israelis on two buses in the southern town of Beersheba.
Mr. Qawasmeh is from a Hebron clan that has been linked to attacks against Israel. Clan members have been killed or arrested, and one carried out a suicide bombing last year.
In another development, the Israeli military withdrew an accusation that Palestinian militants in Gaza City used a United Nations ambulance to transport a rocket.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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