Israel kills 18 Palestinians in north Gaza

BEIT HANOUN/GAZA: Israeli artillery shells killed 18 Palestinian civilians in northern Gaza on Wednesday, local officials and witnesses said, prompting swift vows of retaliation from Hamas and Islamic Jihad.   

It was the deadliest single Israeli attack on Palestinians in four years.   

"We saw legs, we saw heads, we saw hands scattered in the street," said Attaf Hamad, 22, in Beit Hanoun, a town in the northern Gaza Strip that has been a launching ground for Palestinian militants' rocket attacks on Israel.   

The strike drew condemnation across Europe and the Middle East. The European Union expressed "profound shock", and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, the world's largest Islamic body, accused Israel of war crimes.   

Israeli Defence Minister Amir Peretz ordered an investigation, and a halt to shelling in Gaza until its completion, the prime minister's office said. Some of the dead were killed in bed as shells struck seven houses, and others rushed outside, finding no safety.    

Thirteen members of one extended family were killed and the dead included seven children and four women, residents and the Palestinian Health Ministry said.     

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas spoke of a "horrible and ugly massacre" and said that, while he condemned rocket attacks on Israel, they did not justify such harsh military action.   

Khaled Meshaal, leader of the governing Islamic militant group Hamas, urged retaliation. Hamas declared a partial truce in March 2005, which expired at the end of last year. It has not carried out a suicide bombing in Israel since 2004.   

"All Palestinian groups are urged to activate resistance despite the difficult situation on the ground. Our confidence in our military wing to respond is great," said Meshaal, who is based in Damascus.   

The Islamic Jihad militant group, which never accepted the ceasefire brokered by Abbas and Egypt, vowed to carry out suicide bombings in response to the Beit Hanoun strike. Israeli police said they had gone on high alert.   

Hamas's armed wing, decrying Washington's "political and financial support" for Israel, appeared to have changed its policy by calling on Palestinians to attack US targets, urging them "to teach the American enemy harsh lessons".   

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office said he and Peretz "voiced sorrow over the deaths of Palestinian civilians ... and offered emergency humanitarian aid to the Palestinian Authority and medical care for the wounded".   

An Israeli military statement said the army "fired preventative artillery at launch sites from which Qassam rockets were launched (on Monday) into Ashkelon", in southern Israel.   

Israeli media said an artillery battery had missed its target, about a kilometre from Beit Hanoun. An army spokeswoman could not confirm this.       

"We were asleep and we were awakened by shells hitting the house of my uncle next door. Then the windows to our houses were blasted away," said Asma al-Athamna, 14, who was hit by shrapnel. "We fled the house only to be hunted outside. The shells killed my mother and sister and wounded all my siblings."   

In a rare show of unity, Abbas and Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas donated blood together and visited a hospital in northern Gaza treating some of Beit Hanoun's 54 wounded.   

The two leaders have so far failed to agree on the creation of a technocrat unity government that could prompt the West to ease sanctions imposed after Hamas came to power in March.   

The carnage could bring world pressure on Israel to curb its Gaza offensive, begun in June after militants seized a soldier. Israeli ground forces pulled out of Beit Hanoun on Tuesday after a week-long operation, aimed at curbing rocket attacks, that killed at least 52 Palestinians, more than half of them militants, hospital officials and residents said.   

In the occupied West Bank, Israeli soldiers killed four gunmen and a civilian during a raid near the city of Jenin, Palestinian security officials said.   

Israeli forces also killed a Hamas gunman and a 17-year-old civilian near Gaza's Jabalya refugee camp, hospital officials said. The Israeli army said soldiers had shot three gunmen after being attacked with an anti-tank missile.