5 Israeli Troops Die as Militants Set Off Underground Bomb, Attack Base

Palestinian attackers tunneled close to a heavily fortified Israeli outpost in the southern Gaza Strip on Sunday, set off a massive explosion, then raked the base with gunfire, killing five Israeli soldiers and wounding seven, the Israeli military said.

Two Palestinian militant groups, Hamas and the Fatah Hawks, claimed responsibility for the highly coordinated assault on the outpost, only a few yards from the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt.

Israel said it viewed the incident -- the largest single-day loss of life for its army in more than six months -- as extremely grave.

With less than a month before the Palestinian Authority’s Jan. 9 presidential election, officials on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had hoped to maintain relative calm in the West Bank and Gaza. Sunday’s fighting represented the most intense outbreak of violence in the Palestinian territories since the Nov. 11 death of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat.

Gunfire and explosions rocked the area for hours after the 4:30 p.m. attack.

Palestinian residents said that combat helicopters buzzed overhead and more than a dozen tanks rumbled into position after dark near the Rafah refugee camp.

At least two Palestinians, one identified as a fighter and the other as a civilian, were killed in the wake of the outpost attack, Palestinian hospital officials said.

Earlier in the day, Palestinians said five schoolchildren under the age of 12 were wounded by Israeli fire in the Khan Yunis refugee camp, also in southern Gaza. The army said it was targeting Palestinian militants who had fired mortar rounds into the adjacent Jewish settlement of Neve Dekalim. A 7-year-old Palestinian girl was killed a day earlier in similar circumstances in Khan Yunis.

In the militants’ Rafah assault, Israel said three soldiers were rescued from the outpost under fire and flown to hospitals.

The crossing, which is normally thronged with Palestinians, closed for the day when the explosion occurred. Israel came under strong international criticism when it shut the Rafah frontier for three weeks over the summer after receiving warnings of such an attack.

“We had feared something exactly like this,” said an army spokesman, Capt. Jacob Dallal. “Because of the presence of civilians, this crossing point was defined by terrorists as a soft spot.”

Over the last year or more, Palestinian militant groups have used tunnels to attack tightly guarded Israeli bases and outposts in Gaza and laid ever more sophisticated snares for Israeli troops.

Last week, an Israeli soldier and his bomb-sniffing dog were killed in a booby-trapped chicken coop outside Gaza City.

An Israeli military source suggested that retaliation for Sunday’s attack could involve assassinating militant leaders or field commanders, an operation Israel calls “targeted killing.”

In Gaza City, four masked gunmen from Hamas and the Fatah Hawks, a violent splinter group of the mainstream Fatah movement, held a news conference in a darkened street to claim responsibility.

The militants boasted of having tunneled more than a quarter-mile to within yards of the outpost and planting a 2,800-pound bomb, together with a smaller explosive device.

“This operation was in retaliation for Zionist crimes and aggression,” one of the masked men said.

The Israeli army said the Rafah crossing would be closed indefinitely in the wake of the attack.

Special correspondent Rushdie abu Alouf in Gaza City contributed to this report.