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GAZA CITY : Israeli strikes on the Gaza Strip killed nine Hamas militants on Tuesday as the Jewish state went on high alert a day after the first suicide bombing in a year by Palestinian militants on its soil.
Israel struck a police station near the southern Gaza town of Khan Yunis with an air raid hours after an early morning incursion by Israeli soldiers in the nearby border town of Rafah left two Hamas men dead.
Medics said seven militants from the Palestinian Islamist movement were killed in the late afternoon airstrike and another two were wounded.
"The men were in afternoon prayers inside the police station when the missile struck," said a security official in the Hamas-run government that has ruled the Gaza Strip since violently seizing power in the territory last June.
An Israeli army spokesman said the attack targeted a Hamas military position "in response to the Qassam (rocket) launchings that hit (the southern Israeli town of) Sderot this morning".
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, Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades which is loosely linked to the Fatah party of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas who condemned the attack, 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.
Since Israel and the Palestinians formally returned to the negotiating table in November at least 158 people have been killed in Israeli-Palestinian violence, the vast majority of them militants from the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.
Since the 2000 eruption of the latest Palestinian uprising 6,119 people have been killed, the vast majority of them Palestinians, according to an AFP count.
"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.
Israel's staunch ally Washington condemned the bombing, saying it underscored the need to make progress in the 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 Gaza militants could have entered the Jewish state through its porous 250-kilometre (150-mile) frontier with Egypt.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, in an interview published on Tuesday, said his country will not allow its border to be breached again.
"It is a mistake to besiege the Palestinians but we will not accept that the border (with Gaza) be left open indefinitely. What happened will not be repeated," he told Spain's daily newspaper ABC.
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 on Sunday.
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 up 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.
- AFP /ls
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