Israelis kill boy, 9, as army enters Gaza camp

Israeli troops killed three Palestinians, including a boy aged nine, when tanks, backed by helicopter gunships, raided the Khan Yunis refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip yesterday.

Palestinian doctors treated 39 wounded. They said the two dead adults were a gunman resisting the armoured incursion and a man aged 55 whose home was hit by a tank shell. Two Israeli soldiers were wounded.

The boy was one of a group of children taunting Israeli soldiers with stones during the funeral of the two men killed earlier in the day. The doctors said he died in hospital after soldiers shot him in the head.

Army engineers demolished four buildings, including an eight-storey block of flats which, the Israelis said, was used by Palestinian snipers firing at the Neve Dekalim Jewish settlement. A soldier was shot dead from an upper floor there last week.

A military spokesman said that most of the residents had left the building last month after Israel told them it would be demolished. The remainder moved out yesterday after they were warned that the bulldozers were coming. The lower floors had been used to launch Kassam rockets at Israeli troops and settlers, the spokesman said. The three other buildings were deserted.

Israeli sappers safely detonated a 50kg roadside bomb near the Netzarim settlement in northern Gaza Strip earlier yesterday. An improvised mine had destroyed a tank and killed its four-man crew on the same road two weeks ago. Israel resumed its offensive yesterday after a brief respite. The main target is Hamas, which has been testing Ariel Sharon's re-elected government by firing Kassam rockets at Sderot, a small industrial town on the Israeli side of the border. So far, they have caused no casualties.

Hamas is also challenging Yasser Arafat's debilitated security forces for control of the Gaza Strip. Israel wants to weaken Hamas and give Mr Arafat a chance to introduce reforms. The Palestinian leader agreed last week to appoint a prime minister.

The Shin Bet internal security service disclosed yesterday that it had recently arrested Fadi Murtaja, a Hamas militant who allegedly planned to ambush a convoy carrying Mr Sharon. He belonged to a Hamas cell in Bethlehem, which is said to have taken its orders from Gaza. The cell was also accused of plotting to shoot up a synagogue.

The security services arrested five wanted men in the Bethlehem and Hebron areas said to have been involved in planning suicide bombings and trying to smuggle a booby-trapped car into Israel.

¿ Israeli tanks moved into the Nusseirat and Bureij refugee camps in central Gaza Strip early this morning, firing shells and machine guns. A 14-year-old boy was shot and killed and 11 other Palestinians were wounded, hospital officials said. Tanks surrounded two houses in Bureij, apparently planning to destroy them. One of the houses belongs to Mohammed Taha, the local Hamas leader.