Israeli Shell Kills 3 Palestinian Children
Two Palestinian children were killed and a third was critically wounded on Wednesday in a blast in northern Gaza, and the Israeli military acknowledged firing at rocket launchers there.
The area, which is populated by civilians, is frequently used by Palestinian militants to launch rocket attacks against southern Israel.
Dr. Moaiya Hassanain of the Palestinian Health Ministry said 10-year-old Mahmoud Ghazal and his 12-year-old cousin Yehiya Ghazal were killed. Their 10-year-old cousin Sara Ghazal was critically injured, he said.
Witnesses said there were rocket launchers in the area. The Israeli military said its forces saw people handling the launchers and opened fire on them. The military charged that this was not the first time Palestinian militants have employed children in their attacks against Israel.
"The Palestinians send out kids to collect their rocket launchers, and from the view of an Israeli drone, I doubt they can tell they're kids," says CBS News correspondent Robert Berger.
A relative of the children, Wasfi Ghazal, said he heard the sound of an explosion and then children screaming. He held both Israel and the militant rocket squads responsible.
"We are victims of the occupation and victims of the misbehavior of some of the fighters who are randomly choosing our area to target Israel," he told The Associated Press.
In other developments:
Israeli security officials said Syria's military has reduced its war readiness, but offered no details because the exact steps taken by the Syrians are classified. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to divulge the information to the media.
Israeli forces scheduled to hold maneuvers on the Golan Heights will now be moved away from the border to the country's south to further reduce friction, the officials said, and the army's war-readiness status on the Israel-Syria border is now considered over.
In Israel, speculation that Syria might initiate a war on the Golan was rooted in concerns Syria had been emboldened by the performance of Lebanese guerrillas in their conflict with Israel last summer.
The Lebanese Hezbollah militia, a Syrian proxy, ignited the war by attacking an Israeli border patrol, killing three soldiers and capturing two others. It managed to survive a monthlong Israeli offensive during which it bombarded Israeli towns with thousands of rockets.
Israel captured the strategic heights in the 1967 Mideast war and later annexed them. Israel and Syria haven't fought a war on the Golan since 1973.
Syria demands that Israel return the heights in return for peace, but negotiations between the sides last broke down in 2000 over the extent of an Israeli withdrawal.
A Hamas Web site posted an audio message from Shalit, a corporal, in June, the first sign from him since he was seized at an army base near the Gaza Strip on June 25, 2006.
Militants affiliated with the Islamic group Hamas seized Shalit and killed two other soldiers at an army base after tunneling into Israel from the Gaza Strip. Negotiations for his release, mediated by Egypt, have repeatedly broken down and been complicated since Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007.