An Israeli missile attack has killed at least two Palestinian youngsters playing football in the Gaza Strip, during an intensified Israeli military operation that has left at least 22 people dead since Wednesday.
Medics said the youths, all under the age of 16, were killed in an Israeli air assault in the northern Gaza Strip on Thursday.
They said another child was severely injured while playing in a field in the town of Jabaliya.
In an earlier raid, Israel killed three Palestinian fighters. Hospital officials said a fighter from Hamas and two from the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) group were killed on Thursday.
Two fighters from the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades were also killed by Israeli air raids in Nablus, in the occupied West Bank on Thursday.
The Israeli military confirmed the attack, saying they hit command posts and weapons manufacturing and storing sites.
Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, said on a visit to Japan on Thursday that Israeli assaults on Gaza would continue.
"We are at the height of this battle and we will pursue it until the danger threatening residents in the south ends.
"It is a painful process. We are taking painful blows and we will hit back with even more painful blows."
Baby killed
Israeli aircraft also fired missiles at a police post about 150m from the home of Ismail Haniya, the ousted prime minister from Hamas, on Thursday, Palestinian officials said.
Hamas said the house was not damaged, but one person was killed and four others wounded at the police road block.
On Wednesday, Israeli aircraft fired at Haniya's office and the Hamas-run interior ministry.
That attack killed Mohammed Bourai, a 6-month-old baby boy, and left many others wounded, hospital officials said.
A Palestinian security source said an Israeli helicopter had fired on a metals workshop in the east of Gaza City late on Wednesday.
Earlier on Wednesday, five senior members of Hamas were killed when the vehicle in which they were travelling was attacked from the air near the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis, medical officials said.
Hamas said the five were members of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, its armed wing.
Two missiles directly hit the minivan they were travelling in, witnesses told Al Jazeera.
Moaiya Hassanain, a Gaza health ministry official, said four other people were wounded in the attack.
A spokeswoman for the Israeli military confirmed that it had "carried out strikes on vehicles in Khan Younis and identified hitting them".
Occupied Jerusalem: Deputy Israeli Defence Minister Matan Vilnai said on Friday Palestinians would bring on themselves what he called a "bigger holocaust" by stepping up rocket attacks on Israel from the Gaza Strip.
Vilnai told Army Radio, "The more Qassam (rocket) fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they (the Palestinians) will bring upon themselves a bigger holocaust because we will use all our might to defend ourselves."
Israeli air strikes on the coastal territory, controlled by Hamas, have killed at least 32 Palestinians, including five children, in the past two days.
"Holocaust" is a term rarely used in Israel outside discussions of the Nazi genocide during the Second World War.
Defence Minister Ehud Barak was seemingly preparing the way for an offensive by sending confidential messages to world leaders, including US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who plans to visit the region next week.
According to reports, he told the leaders, "Israel is not keen on and rushing for an offensive, but Hamas is leaving us no choice."
The mother put him kindly in his cradle. The father bent over to kiss the chubby cheek of the five-month toddler.
"Come on! Grow up sweat heart," whispered the father Naser tenderly in the ears of Mohammad. "Our baby will grow up, play hide and seek and marry the prettiest of the girls."
"We will always love you and get you he best of clothes and toys," added his wife Eman as they kept looking at the sleeping angel.
With his innocent look and broad smile, Mohammad came to this life after five long years of patience and impotency endured by his parents.
They wanted nothing but a baby who brings joy to a life growing mundane and gives purpose to it under a paralyzing Israeli punishment and a crippling blockade.
Mohammad will not grow up; he will not smile any longer neither will he play hide and seek.
"The *******s killed him," shouted tearful Naser.
Mohammad was killed Wednesday, February 27, in one of the deadly Israeli missile attacks on Gaza.
"I ran like crazy to Mohammad's cradle. He was motionless," the bereaved father recalled the heart-wrenching scene.
Naser rushed his bleeding baby to the hospital in the immediate vicinity but it was too late.
"He was already dead. The Israelis killed this helpless innocent toddler," said Naser with a tinge of bitterness in his voice.
All Targeted
In killing a toddler, Naser says Israel is targeting all Palestinians.
"Why on earth did they kill our joy?" cried Naser.
"Why did they deprive me of the love of my life? Why did they kill him?"
At least 32 Palestinians, a third of whom were children, were killed in two days of unabated Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip.
Four children, aged eight, nine, 11 and 12, were killed Thursday, February 28, in an Israeli raid as they played football in the northern town of Jabaliya.
Another 12-year-old boy died of wounds sustained in a Gaza raid the previous day.
The chief of Israel's internal security service (Shin Bet), Yuval Diskin, drew fire last month after considering children and civilians killed in indiscriminate Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip over the past two years as "terrorists."
At Mohammad's cradle, the mother was still in a state of shock that she could not speak.
The grandmother was sitting nearby kissing a mobile photo Naser took for Mohammad minutes before passing away.
"God **** this world as it stands idly while Israel kiss a toddler?" Umm Naser fumed.
perhaps it is time to broker some sort of peace deal so these atrocities may cease and these people can live without the fear of losing their children.... How sad, this probably happens everyday
"War does not determine who is right - only who is left."
- Bertrand Russell
"He who fears being conquered is sure of defeat." - Napoleon Bonaparte
"There is nothing so likely to produce peace as to be well prepared to meet the
enemy." - George Washington
A deal will never happen the only deal that will bring peace to the palestinians and to the world as a whole is if israel just leave palestine,to where though, i dont know and i dont care
A deal will never happen the only deal that will bring peace to the palestinians and to the world as a whole is if israel just leave palestine,to where though, i dont know and i dont care
so then condemn the babies and other innocents to death because of a refusal to admit defeat
"War does not determine who is right - only who is left."
- Bertrand Russell
"He who fears being conquered is sure of defeat." - Napoleon Bonaparte
"There is nothing so likely to produce peace as to be well prepared to meet the
enemy." - George Washington
If this was the other show then everyone would be condemning the Palestineans, but since it's Israel doing these actions it gets ignored for the most part. Or someone wants to makes excuses for the Israelies.
Children are being killed and wounded by Hamas rocket fire as well. Nobody has the moral high ground in this conflict. The only option is to make it stop, even if that means brokering a peace deal with the "Zionists".
"Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not, and a sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is."
Israel pressed its assault against Gaza, home to 1.6 million Palestinians, on Saturday, March 1, killing 32 Palestinians, including at least five children.
"We are in the middle of a total war," Abu Alaa, a resident of the northern Gaza town of Jabaliya, told Agence France-Presse (AFP) over phone as he and his children took cover.
"We hear the rockets and the explosions everywhere... we cannot leave our homes.
"They're shooting at everything that moves," he added.
Residents hid inside their homes and imams read out Qur'anic verses over loudspeakers from inside mosques, witnesses said.
Doctor Muawiya Hassanein, head of Gaza emergency medical services, said most of the dead were killed by a "great number of rockets fired by Israeli planes" in and around Jabaliya. Medics said the dead include at least four children and three women.
Among the dead was a Gazan mother who was preparing breakfast for her children when she was hit by gunfire.
A 12-year-old girl and her 11-year-old brother were also killed by shrapnel as they slept.
Four Palestinians, including three Hamas fighters, were killed in an Israeli army incursion in the Jabaliya refugee camp.
Four more Palestinians were also killed in an Israeli raid in the camp at dawn.
A 17-year-old girl and a fighter from the Islamic Jihad movement were also killed.
At least 200 Palestinian were also injured in the unabated Israeli attacks.
The Israeli army said that two Israeli soldiers were killed in clashes with Palestinian fighters in northern Gaza.
Israel Army Radio also reported five Israeli soldiers were lightly wounded in the clashes.
The new Palestinian deaths came a day after Deputy Israeli Defense Minister Matan Vilnai threatened that Israel would turn Gaza into a "bigger holocaust" for the Palestinians.
At least 70 Palestinians, third of whom children, have been killed in four days of Israeli raids and air strikes in the Gaza Strip.
The latest deaths brought to 6,227 the total number of people since the Palestinian intifada erupted in 2000, most of them Palestinians, according to an AFP count.
The flaring violence came as tens of thousands of Gazans took to the streets in the impoverished strip to protest the Israeli killing machine.
"They've killed my right to childhood," read a sign held by a child, clad in a red-stained white funeral shroud, who attended a large rally in Jabaliya.
Among the protesters in Gaza City was Khalil al-Hayyah, a Hamas leader who lost a 25-year-old son in an Israeli air strike Thursday.
"We will never recognize Israel, even if it assassinates all our leaders and kills our children," he told the crowd.
Sacked Hamas-led premier Ismail Haniyeh earlier said that the Palestinian people were facing a ferocious war.
"Gaza today faces a real war, a crazy war led by the enemy against our people," he told worshippers on Friday.
Haniyeh, whose group routed Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas' security forces from Gaza in June, lashed out at the US administration for portraying the Israeli aggressions as "self-defense", accusing the Arab world of "encouraging the Israeli aggression" through its silence.
Abbas, who has shared Israel's hostility to Hamas since the group defeated his forces in Gaza, called Israeli threats "dangerous".
He urged Israel to cease its attacks on the territory and also called on Palestinian resistance groups to stop rocket attacks on Israel.
"It is in the interest of the Palestinian people not to give Israel any pretext to continue its aggression," Abbas' office said in a statement.
Israel claims that its offensives in the densely-populated Gaza aim at halting the rocket fire from Gaza into Israel.
A five-month Israeli incursion in 2006 killed several hundred Palestinians but failed to stop the rocket fire.
The chief of Israel's left-wing Meretz party, Yossi Beilin, said Hamas had offered a truce around Gaza over the past two weeks but the overtures had been rejected by the Israeli leadership.
According to a survey published in Haaretz newspaper on Wednesday, February 27,most Israelis think their government should hold direct talks with Hamas to reach a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and secure the release of Israeli soldier Gilad Shilat, who was taken prisoner in a cross-border joint operation by Palestinian resistance groups.
Book 041, Number 6985:
Abu Huraira reported Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews.
why should we by shy or ashamed of this hadith? these zionist jews are the most vile creatures on this planet they have killed 70 in 3 days including several children and BABIES. i cannot waittttttttt till the day this hadith is fulfilled.
By all means target the perps, but to kill the innocent is justified?
Isael certainly needn't have killed 60 people to get 3 terrorists (freedom fighters if you will). I am sure the slaughter that's been going on down there could be avoided, the question is whether Israel wants to avoid it..
Above all, I'm not sure I can trust the media from that area, let it be israeli or palestinian, so I don't know who, where and why killed whom and whether it was justified or not.
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