Beit Hanoun, Gaza Strip: Six Palestinians were killed as Israeli armour swept back into the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun yesterday and shelled the south in a bid to retrieve a missing soldier and stop rocket attacks.
Tanks, armoured vehicles and bulldozers rolled into Beit Hanoun before dawn, in the deepest Israeli incursion into the area since Israel began its punishing offensive on June 28 after the capture of Corporal Gilad Shalit.
Three Palestinians from the armed wing of the governing Hamas, which claimed joint responsibility for the attack in which Shalit was snatched, were killed when an Israeli aircraft fired a missile into a group of militants.
An elderly Palestinian woman and two others were killed by tank shelling in the south.
Another 20 people were wounded, including a woman and a baby, by sporadic gunfire and Israeli shelling in the northern incursion, medical sources said.
Drone attack
Palestinian Prime Minister Esmail Haniya, whose Hamas-led government has been directly targeted by the offensive, denounced the international community for not stepping in to halt the Israeli onslaught as the death toll rose.
On the ground, dozens of Palestinians living on the edges of Beit Hanoun were fleeing their homes and taking shelter in UN-run schools in the nearby Jabaliya refugee camp, witnesses said.
Local Palestinian security sources said troops had advanced up to a kilometre into Beit Hanoun from its outer fringes, but an Israeli military spokeswoman denied they were in the centre of the Hamas-run town.
The Israeli military confirmed that a pair of overnight air strikes targeted militants around Beit Hanoun. A third air attack hit a Hamas operations room in the Jabaliya camp, the spokeswoman said.
Meanwhile an Israeli drone attacked a car carrying Islamic Jihad militants near Beit Hanoun but the gunmen escaped unscathed, security sources said.
'Such cruelty'
In the south, a 75-year-old Palestinian woman was found dead after being wounded by Israeli tank shelling, local medical sources said.
Fatma Jadallah was wounded in the thigh when tanks opened fire on a neighbourhood near Gaza's destroyed international airport in Rafah, but she bled to death before the ambulance could arrive because of continued shelling.
"The world is in a very strange state of silence," the Palestinian premier was quoted as saying in an interview in Turkey's Al Sabah newspaper.
"I am wondering whether the international community has been so silent ever before in the face of such cruelty. I've never heard of or read about the acceptance of such cruelty," Haniya said.
Israel has waged a deadly air campaign in Gaza since 19-year-old Shalit was seized on June 25, sparking the worst Israeli-Palestinian crisis in months and some of the deadliest fighting in the Palestinian territories for years.
The government has refused any negotiations with the Hamas movement that advocates the destruction of the Jewish state, vowing the assault will continue "in places, in time, in measures" of its choosing.
Tanks and bulldozers had pulled out from all but one area of Gaza Friday, as Israel switched its attention to Lebanon, opening a new front in the Middle East crisis after Hezbollah captured another two soldiers on Wednesday.
Air strikes have continued, however, and the rumbling campaign in Gaza has now left 82 Palestinians and one Israeli soldier dead. Both Hamas and the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah have demanded the release of prisoners held in Israeli jails in exchange for freeing the servicemen they hold.
