Israel presses ahead with second front against Palestinians

GAZA CITY (AFP) - With world attention focused on Lebanon, Israel has pursued its second front against Palestinian militants, levelling two houses and wounding five people in the Gaza Strip a day after killing two militants in the West Bank.

Five Palestinians were wounded in an Israeli air strike on a house belonging to a member of the ruling Islamist Hamas movement, security officials said.

The Israeli army told the owner by telephone an hour before the strike that his home would be targeted, security officials said on Sunday.

Another air strike destroyed a house belonging to a member of the Popular Resistance Committees in Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip. He was also notified of the impending strike beforehand, and no injuries were reported.

An army spokesman said the Gaza City raid was aimed at a "Hamas center" and the Beit Hanoun raid targeted a weapons storage site.

Hamas and the Popular Resistance Committees are two of the three Palestinian militant groups that said they captured Corporal Gilad Shalit in a deadly June 25 cross-border raid.

The raid, which killed two other soldiers, sparked a massive Israeli offensive in Gaza for the first time since it withdrew in 2005 after a 38-year occupation.

According to an AFP count at least 147 Palestinians and one Israeli soldier have been killed since the attacks against Gaza began last month.

The military says it aims to free Shalit and stop Palestinian militant groups from firing rockets onto Israeli territory.

The rocket attacks have sharply decreased during the past month, but have not ceased altogether.

Separately, Israel continued what it called a "limited incursion" that began on Saturday near the Erez border crossing with Gaza in what the army said was a bid to destroy tunnels and "neutralise" bombs.

Overnight, warplanes bombed a house in Gaza City which the army said contained arms and ammunition and also tunnels near the town of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.

Sunday's strikes came a day after two Palestinian militants, one described as a military leader of the radical group Islamic Jihad, were killed by undercover Israeli agents in the West Bank city of Nablus.

Hani Awidjan, 29, of Islamic Jihad, and 25-year-old Amid al-Masri of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades -- the armed wing of president Mahmud Abbas's Fatah party -- were gunned down in the street by Israeli soldiers disguised as Palestinian civilians.

Their deaths brought to 5,296 the number of people killed since the outbreak of the Palestinian intifada in 2000, most of them Palestinians, according to another AFP count.

The month-long Israeli offensive has wreaked massive damage on the impoverished Gaza Strip, where electricity is now rationed and sewage is left untreated, sparking warnings of a humanitarian crisis.

Living conditions for the 1.4 million people in densely packed Gaza had already deteriorated badly after the West suspended all direct aid to the Palestinian government following the January election victory of the Islamist Hamas.

The European Union and the United States consider Hamas to be a terrorist group, and suspended all direct aid to the Palestinian government following Hamas's upset election win. Hamas has refused Western calls to renounce violence and recognize Israel.

The EU had been the biggest aid donor to the Palestinians, giving some 500 million euros a year until the freezing of some of these funds in April after Hamas assumed power.

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