Gaza City - A three-year-old Palestinian girl was killed Tuesday and at least six other people wounded in a series of Israeli air and tank strikes on the Gaza Strip, medical sources said.
Medics named the girl as Hala Abu Sabikha from the central Gaza Strip, noting “three other members of her family were wounded.”
Emergency services spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra said six people had been wounded in a series of strikes, which came in response to the shooting to death earlier of an Israeli repairing the security fence separating Gaza from Israel.
The Hamas interior ministry said Abu Sabikha and her family were injured in an air strike on a refugee camp in central Gaza.
It also said a person was moderately wounded in a tank shelling near the Karni crossing in northern Gaza and that there were two other air strikes on militant positions in northern Gaza, where no casualties were reported.
The Israeli army said aircraft, tanks and infantry “targeted terror sites in the Gaza Strip” in retaliation for the shooting of the Israeli, noting that the man was the “first Israeli civilian killed in the vicinity of the Gaza Strip” since a major eight-day outbreak of fighting in and around Gaza in November 2012.
“The sites targeted were a weapon-manufacturing facility and a terror infrastructure in the southern Gaza Strip, a terror site and another terror infrastructure in the central Gaza Strip and a concealed rocket launcher in the northern Gaza Strip,” a statement said.
Sapa-AFP