Two civilians among seven killed in Israeli Gaza air strikes

An Israeli aircraft fired two missiles at a moving vehicle in the centre of the southern town of Khan Yunis, killing three members of the Islamic Jihad militant group and wounding four bystanders, security sources said.

A second strike on the Maghazi refugee camp in central Gaza Strip killed Salah Qufa, 46, his 23-year-old son Iyad and a 40-year-old civilian, and injured two people, the sources said.

A fourth person injured in the strike died of his wounds several hours later, medical sources said. His identity remained unclear.

Salah Qufa was identified as a member of the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, a militant group linked to president Mahmud Abbas's Fatah movement.

An Israeli army spokesman confirmed the military had launched two air strikes, saying the Khan Yunis strike targeted "Islamic Jihad militants who planned to carry out a suicide attack inside Israel and who were responsible for other attacks in the past."

Shortly after the second air strike Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip fired two rockets against southern Israel that hit the centre of the town Sderot, lightly wounding one person, the army said.

A total of six rockets had been fired from Gaza over the past 24 hours, it said.

Eleven Palestinians were killed and more than 40 wounded in an extensive Israeli ground incursion in southern and northern Gaza on Wednesday, in what was the deadliest violence since the Islamists of Hamas seized Gaza on June 15.

The Islamist Hamas movement, which violently seized control of Gaza on June 15, vowed to continue fighting Israel.

"These attacks are a sign of the increasing danger from and Israel which plans to destroy the resistance in Gaza Strip. We have the right to fight against this threat," Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zukhri told AFP.

Saturday's deaths bring to 5,773 the number of people killed since the outbreak of the second Palestinian uprising in September 2000, most of them Palestinians, according to an AFP tally.

Hamas also warned Saturday that it would resist the deployment of any international peacekeeping force to its Gaza bastion as advocated by Abbas.

"We would regard such a force as an army of occupation and we would forcibly resist it," Hamas's military wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, said in a statement.

"We appeal to the international community and to Arab states to reject this request which could harm Palestinian unity," it added.

In talks with French President Nicolas Sarkozy in Paris on Friday, Abbas called for deployment of an international force to Gaza.

The Palestinian president said such a force was necessary to provide security for early parliamentary and presidential elections that he wants to organise in the coming months after he sacked a Hamas-led government and appointed an emergency cabinet of technocrats in its place.

Hamas's violent seizure of the impoverished Gaza Strip has effectively split the Palestinian territory from the West Bank where Abbas's Western-backed emergency government is based.

It has also raised fears of a humanitarian crisis in Gaza where over 80 percent of the population depends on foreign aid which is mainly transferred through Israeli-controlled crossings that have only been partly opened since Hamas's takeover.

The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees said on Friday that the current aid flowing into Gaza is not enough to prevent a humanitarian crisis.

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