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GAZA CITY : Israeli raids on Gaza killed six Palestinian fighters and a teacher on Thursday as the army pressed on with an assault on the Hamas-run territory following a suicide bombing in Israel this week.
Escalating violence in and around Gaza this week has now seen 19 Palestinians, mostly militants, killed in Israeli strikes and several Israelis, including two young children, injured by militant rocket attacks.
In the first air strike on Thursday, four militants - three from the armed wing of Hamas and a fourth from Islamic Jihad - were killed near Jabaliya in the north of the territory by a missile fired from a drone.
The second air raid saw two militants killed near Tuffah north of Gaza City, while four others were wounded, two of them seriously, medics said.
Hamas said Israeli ground forces were also operating in the area, while an Israeli military spokesman said only that "an army operation is underway."
A teacher was also killed when an Israeli tank shell hit a high school in the northern town of Beit Hanun, wounding three students, medics said.
Hamas militants meanwhile launched at least 14 rockets and mortars at Israel, with one lightly wounding two civilians.
On Wednesday two children, aged two and four, sustained shrapnel wounds when a rocket slammed into their home in southern Israel, Israeli medics said.
Since Israelis and Palestinians renewed peace talks in late November after a seven-year freeze, at least 168 people have been killed in violence between the two sides, most of them militants in Gaza, according to an AFP tally.
Israel went on the offensive on Tuesday as Hamas, the Islamist movement that has ruled the Strip since violently seizing power there in June 2007 - claimed responsibility for the first suicide bombing inside the Jewish state in a year.
It was the first time Hamas had claimed an attack since August 2004.
Twelve Gaza militants have been killed since Monday, all but one Hamas, and the group has vowed revenge, retaliating with rocket and mortar fire.
"Hamas long ago adopted resistance as a strategic choice to claim our rights and principles and to protect our people, our land and our holy sites," Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhum said in a statement.
"These targeted attacks and dangerous escalations will only increase our commitment to this choice."
Israel has been on alert since Monday's bombing - the first suicide attack in the Jewish state since January last year - in the southern desert town of Dimona that killed one woman and wounded nearly a dozen other people.
The attack came after a nearly two-week breach of the Gaza-Egypt border, which raised fears in Israel that Gaza militants could have entered the Jewish state through its porous 250-kilometre (150-mile) frontier with Egypt.
Militants blew open the border barrier on January 23 in a bid to break a punishing Israeli siege on the impoverished territory, but it was resealed by Egyptian and Hamas forces on Sunday.
Israel has increasingly tightened restrictions on Gaza since the start of the second Palestinian uprising in 2000, notably in June 2006 after militants seized a soldier and a year later when Hamas took control.
In October, Israel began reducing fuel supplies to Gaza, sparking an outcry by rights groups which warned of dire consequences for hospitals and other basic infrastructure on which Gaza's 1.5 million inhabitants rely.
Aid groups say Israel is expected to further reduce the amount of electricity it supplies to Gaza, over the next two weeks shaving 1.5 megawatts off the 120 megawatts it currently provides.
New York-based Human Rights Watch accused Israel of "collective punishment" over the supply cuts in its campaign to halt the near-daily rocket attacks launched by Palestinian militants at southern Israel.
"Israel views restricting fuel and electricity to Gaza as a way to pressure Palestinian armed groups to stop their rocket and suicide attacks," HRW's Middle East director Joe Stork said in a statement.
"But the cuts are seriously affecting civilians who have nothing to do with these armed groups, and that violates a fundamental principle of the laws of war." - AFP/ms
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