World

Israel Accused Of Killing 2 Kids In Attack

August 21, 2007 / 1:53 PM EDT / CBS/AP

Israeli forces trying to combat Palestinian rocket squads along the border with Gaza killed two children on Tuesday, Palestinian medical officials said.

The two dead were 10 and 12 years old, according to Dr. Muawiya Hassanin of the Palestinian Health Ministry. A third child, 10, was seriously wounded and six other people were lightly injured, all of them civilians, he said.

The Israeli army said ground forces fired at two Palestinians who were spotted near a rocket launcher in an area of northern Gaza where a rocket was fired into Israel earlier. An army statement said Palestinian rocket teams have been known to send young children to retrieve rocket launchers after firing.

"In light of the reports, it seems likely that this was the case here," the army said.

The Israeli military regularly carries out attacks targeting Palestinian militants launching rockets at towns in southern Israel.

Gaza militants fired three rockets into Israel on Tuesday including one that hit an empty kindergarten in the town of Sderot near Gaza, the army said.

Earlier Tuesday, Israeli troops killed three Islamic Jihad militants in southern Gaza. On Monday, the Israeli air force killed six Hamas gunmen.

And Tuesday evening, one Palestinian was killed when Israeli aircraft attacked a Hamas militant base in southern Gaza on Tuesday evening, Hamas officials and witnesses said. But Israel's military, which acknowledges such operations, said it was not involved.

Several people were wounded, the Hamas officials said. The identity of the person killed was not immediately clear.

The Israeli army had no immediate comment.

In other developments:

European donors promised relief on Tuesday for Gazans who sweltered in dark, airless homes and choked on generator smoke during five days of power outages. The European Union suspended fuel deliveries to a major Gaza power plant, fearing that the Islamic militant group Hamas is using revenues from electricity to bypass a crippling Western boycott and finance its government, reports CBS News correspondent Robert Berger.

The moderate Fatah movement of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas doesn't want its money propping up Hamas, which violently seized control of Gaza in June. But neither does it want to punish Gaza's mostly pro-Fatah 90,000 civil servants whose salaries form the backbone of the already badly bruised economy. So it has resumed paying wages, on one condition: That the civil servants stay home. For a year, Gaza's public employees went to work but didn't get paid. Now most are getting paid but not working.

Israeli President Shimon Peres said Tuesday he would hold talks with Abbas in the near future. "Everyone wants to meet and we will meet," Peres, who won the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the first Israeli-Palestinian accord, told reporters in Jerusalem when asked if he would meet Abbas. "We have things to talk about. Not every meeting is negotiations."

The U.S.-backed Palestinian government in the West Bank is trying to cut off funds to Islamic charities that helped propel Hamas to power, reports Berger. Two Islamic charities in Gaza say Palestinian banks froze their accounts. That could harm Hamas-run schools and clinics, a key source of support for the group among the population.