6 Die as Alleged Hamas Bomb Factory Explodes in Gaza : Mideast: Blast kills two top members of militants’ military unit. Islamic group charges PLO-Israeli plot.

Islamic militants accidentally blew up their workshop while making bombs in Gaza City on Sunday, killing at least six people and wounding more than 30 others, Palestinian police said.

Brig. Gen. Ghazi Jabali, chief of the Gaza City police, said that members of a military unit of the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, were working in an elaborate “bomb factory” on the second floor of a three-story apartment building when they detonated some explosives they were making.

The blast destroyed the building, raining debris across a mile-wide area in the densely populated Sheik Radwan neighborhood and throwing the badly torn bodies of some victims 300 yards.

Among the dead were Kamal Kheil, a top commander of the Hamas military unit Iziddin al-Qassam, and Nidal Dadaeish, another Iziddin leader, Jabali said. Kheil ranked high on Israel’s most-wanted list for the 1993 ambush killing of the officer in charge of undercover units in the Gaza Strip and for the slaying of 16 Palestinians who had collaborated with Israeli forces.

But the victims Sunday also included a 3-year-old girl and a 10-year-old boy, according to witnesses, who saw their bodies pulled from the building’s rubble.

Although police sources first put the apparent number of victims at eight, Jabali said that only six bodies had been identified. Rescue workers continued to dig through the rubble in a search for others believed missing.

*

A Hamas spokesman denied that the Iziddin members were making bombs and asserted that they had been blown up as a result of a conspiracy between the ruling Palestinian Authority and Israel.

Mahmoud Zahhar, a Hamas leader in Gaza City, told angry residents in Sheik Radwan, a strongly Islamic neighborhood, that Hamas was not making bombs there.

“This is a plot, they were assassinated, it was carried out by an explosives expert,” Zahhar asserted. “This has happened before, and when we discover who was behind it, his fate will be as bad as this.”

In its opposition to the accord reached between the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel on Palestinian self-government, Hamas has recently carried out a wave of suicide bombings in Israel, including an October attack that killed 23 people, including the bomber, on a bus in central Tel Aviv.

But Hamas has a tacit understanding with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat that it will not launch attacks on Israelis within the Palestinian self-rule areas--the Gaza Strip and Jericho in the West Bank.

“This cowardly criminal act came as a result of extensive intelligence work by Arafat’s Authority,” Hamas said. “Our people noticed the security apparatus were focusing on our martyrs, particularly Kamal Kheil.”

Tayeb Abdel-Rahim, secretary general of the Palestinian Authority, said the Hamas members were preparing “a very large explosive” that was to be packed in a big suitcase, apparently for use in Israel.

Jabali said that police successfully defused six more bombs, which had already been prepared and placed in carrying cases, and seized nearly 70 pounds of chemicals that could have become high explosives if combined with other materials found in the debris.

“This is a very dangerous thing, because they have exposed lives of citizens to danger and have used houses as hiding places,” Jabali said.