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GAZA CITY : Six Hamas fighters were killed in an Israeli air strike on the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, the day after the first suicide bombing in a year by Palestinian militants on Israeli soil.
The air raid hit a target near the southern Gaza town of Khan Yunis and came after an early morning incursion by Israeli soldiers in the nearby border town of Rafah left two Hamas men dead.
Medics said six militants from the Palestinian Islamist movement were killed and Hamas-run television said they were praying at the time.
An Israeli army spokesman confirmed the incident, saying the attack was against a Hamas military position in response to missiles fired at the rocket-battered Israeli town of Sderot earlier Tuesday.
Israel was on high alert after a suicide bombing on Monday in the southern desert town of Dimona killed a woman and wounded nearly a dozen other people, in the first such attack since January 2007.
One of the groups that claimed responsibility, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades which is loosely linked to Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas's Fatah party, said the bombers were from Gaza.
The bombing came just two months after Israel and the Palestinians revived their peace process, raising fears that the already troubled talks could be further bogged down.
"Our forces have been placed on a heightened state of alert as we fear a wave of terrorist attacks after Monday's attack in Dimona," Bertie Ohayon, a senior police officer, told public radio.
"We have mobilised thousands of police personnel and border guards, backed up by volunteers, to comb through densely-populated areas and carry out surveillance in sensitive areas, notably along the border with Egypt," he said.
A 73-year-old Israeli woman was killed in the attack. One of the bombers blew himself up, the other was killed by police.
Israel's staunch ally Washington condemned the bombing, saying it underscored the need to make progress in the Middle East peace process relaunched amid great fanfare at a US conference in November.
Negotiations have already stalled because of deep discord on the core issues of the conflict, including Palestinian refugees, Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and the status of Jerusalem.
The bombing came after a near two-week breach of the Gaza-Egypt border, raising fears in Israel that militants from the Hamas-run territory could have entered the Jewish state through its porous 250-kilometre (150-mile) frontier with Egypt.
The Gaza-Egypt border was blown open by militants on January 23 in a bid to break a punishing Israeli blockade on the impoverished territory. It was resealed by Egyptian and Hamas forces at the weekend.
One Palestinian was shot dead late Monday when a demonstration at the border against the closure turned violent with stone-throwing, exchanges of fire and tear gas between protestors and Egyptian security forces.
Following the shooting, hundreds of Palestinians rounded by Egyptian authorities in the divided border town of Rafah set fire to the government building where they were being held, a security source told AFP.
Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni was to recommend at a meeting on Wednesday that Egypt double its forces to 1,500 along its border with Gaza, a senior Israeli official told AFP.
The size of the Egyptian force on the border is regulated by an August 2005 agreement between Israel and Cairo when the Jewish state was withdrawing its troops and settlers from Gaza after a 38-year occupation.
The border breach has revived discussions in Israel of building a fence along the frontier with Egypt -- an idea first brought up several years ago but abandoned because of the estimated high cost.
- AFP /ls
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