MIDDLE EAST: Mourners bury Gazan teenager killed in Israeli airstrike/ Army raids West Bank town

Hundreds of mourners gathered in southern Gaza on Wednesday (September 27) to lay to rest a 14-year-old Palestinian girl killed in Israeli airstrike. Early on Wednesday morning, an Israeli warplane bombed and destroyed a home in the refugee camp of Rafah, killing the teenage girl in a neighbouring building and wounding 10 other people, Palestinian medics said. The Israeli army said it had fired at a house camouflaging a weapons-smuggling tunnel in the Rafah, on the Egyptian border, and that its occupants had been warned beforehand to leave. Dr. Ali Mousa, the director of Rafah's hospital, told Reuters that the girl died when a block from the house that Israel bombed twice ricocheted into a neighbouring building causing it to collapse. He said 10 other people were wounded by the blast, most of them women and children who suffered broken bones, bruises and shrapnel wounds. The Israeli strike came hours after a rocket fired from Gaza wounded an off-duty Israeli soldier in the southern Israeli town of Sderot. Israel has stepped up military operations in Gaza, a coastal strip it had withdrawn from last year, after Palestinian militants captured a soldier in a June 25 cross-border raid. Elsewhere, in the West Bank city of Nablus, Israeli forces raided the Balata refugee camp in search of militants, a military spokesperson said. He said the troops arrested two militants aged 17 who revealed the location of a 10 kg bomb belt. It was detonated in a controlled manner. jrs/jrc

ITN Source | September 27, 2006

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