Israeli Strike on Militants Also Kills 9 Civilians

An Israeli airstrike against Palestinian militants here Tuesday killed 11 people, nine of them civilians. The attack came as Israel’s military said an internal inquiry had shown it was not responsible for a blast last week that left eight civilians dead on a Gaza beach.

Israeli military officials defended the latest airstrike, which came only four days after the beach explosion -- and poignant footage of a 12-year-old Palestinian girl wailing over slain relatives -- received prominent worldwide coverage.

Israeli officials said they now believe Friday’s blast, which came as Israeli tanks, aircraft and naval vessels were firing on targets in the Gaza Strip, was not caused by an errant Israeli artillery shell as initially thought, but probably by buried explosives.

“This incident was not caused by any act of the Israeli security forces,” Defense Minister Amir Peretz said at a news conference in Tel Aviv. Israeli officials in recent days have suggested that Palestinian militants planted land mines on the beach to thwart any attempted landing by Israeli commandos.

The Tuesday airstrike and Israeli denial drew angry Palestinian reactions. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, labeling the latest attack an act of “state terrorism,” accused Israel of escalating the violence.

“People are martyred and injured daily and they are all innocent people walking the streets,” Abbas said in a statement to the official Wafa news agency.

Officials with the Islamic militant group Hamas rejected suggestions that a Palestinian rocket or a land mine planted by its fighters might have caused last week’s beach explosion.

In Tuesday’s attack, an Israeli aircraft fired missiles at a car in Gaza City carrying members of the militant group Islamic Jihad who allegedly were on their way to fire a Katyusha rocket into southern Israel. The first missile missed the target but still damaged the car, and the second struck it directly, according to Palestinian witnesses and the Israeli military.

Witnesses said shrapnel from the second explosion sprayed bystanders and others who had gathered around the vehicle after the first strike. Four medics from a nearby children’s hospital were killed after they raced to the scene following the first explosion, hospital officials said.

Besides killing 11 people, the attack injured about 20. Military officials say Katyusha rockets, which have long been part of the arsenal of Hezbollah guerrillas in southern Lebanon, have a greater range and more explosive punch than the homemade Kassam projectiles that Gaza-based militants most often launch into southern Israel.

Capt. Noa Meir, an army spokeswoman, said the second Israeli missile was already in the air when the crowd of Palestinians clustered around the militants’ car.

“It was not apparent there were civilians there,” Meir said. “We do not target civilians.”

Meir said the military was especially concerned about the possibility that militants would succeed in launching Katyushas, whose 12-mile reach puts them within range of Israeli cities such as Ashkelon. She said it would have been the fourth such attempt to fire a Katyusha into Israel in the last 2 1/2 months. None has succeeded.

Among the dead from Tuesday’s airstrike were Ashraf Mughrabi, a 31-year-old barber who was standing outside his home, his 6-year-old son, Maher, and 13-year-old nephew, Hisham.

The house sits next to the spot where witnesses said the second missile exploded. The building’s concrete walls were peppered with holes from flying shrapnel; half of a faded blue steel door lay on its side nearby.

Iyad Marouf, who owns a nearby concrete factory and arrived after the second blast, said Ashraf Mughrabi had forgotten his cellphone and returned home from his shop when the missiles hit.

“The second missile hit the car and killed Ashraf and the family,” Marouf said.

Mughrabi’s wife, Nisreen, 28, was seriously injured.

In a noisy procession through Gaza City streets to the Mughrabis’ weatherworn home, mourners carried the bodies of the father and son, both wrapped in the yellow flag of Abbas’ Fatah movement, to which Ashraf Mughrabi belonged. Fatah gunmen, some looking barely old enough for facial hair, fired bursts from Kalashnikov assault rifles as a defiant message blared over loudspeakers mounted on pickup trucks.

“We are going to send more and more rockets into Sderot and Ashkelon!” the speaker shouted.

Sderot is a southern Israeli town that has been frequently targeted by militants. A Kassam attack Sunday seriously injured an Israeli man there.

Militants have stepped up Kassam attacks since Friday, when the beach explosion prompted Hamas to call off an informal 16-month-old cease-fire that the militant group had observed as it moved into electoral politics. Since then, the Israeli military has reported more than 100 rockets fired.

Israeli military officials said Tuesday that an internal investigation of Friday’s blast had definitively ruled out Israeli ordnance as the cause. The military had initially assumed that the explosion had been caused by an errant round during artillery shelling of northern Gaza about the same time.

Maj. Gen. Meir Kalifi, who headed the inquiry, said photos, television footage, intelligence reports and the testimony of Palestinian witnesses were used to pinpoint the exact time and location of the beach blast. The investigation also reviewed the timing and location of all Israeli ordnance fired that day from tanks, aircraft and ships.

The beach explosion, Kalifi said, occurred between 4:57 and 5:10 p.m. Army officials accounted for five of six 155-millimeter artillery shells fired by a tank that day. None hit the beach, and the unaccounted-for shell was fired long before the beach blast, Kalifi said.

In addition, shrapnel fragments removed from the body of a Palestinian woman injured on the beach and treated at an Israeli hospital could not have originated from a 155-millimeter shell, said Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, the army’s chief of staff, who presented the results of the investigation with Kalifi and Peretz.

All three air force strikes Friday hit at least a mile and a half north of the beach site. In addition, 17 76-millimeter shells fired from naval vessels in a 24-hour period that day similarly hit far from the beach and not at the time of the blast, Kalifi said.

“There is no chance whatsoever that even shrapnel would have reached the location of the incident,” Kalifi said. “All shells fired hit all the targets.”

But a human rights researcher who said he had investigated the scene of the explosion insisted Tuesday that it was all but certain the blast was caused by an artillery shell.

Marc Garlasco, a New York-based military analyst for Human Rights Watch, said the size and shape of the crater formed by the blast, scraps of shrapnel plucked from the scene and victims, and the nature of their wounds all but ruled out the possibility that the explosion had been caused by a Kassam rocket or land mine.

Garlasco, who said he had worked in U.S. military intelligence and researched scenes of battle damage in Iraq and Kosovo, told reporters in Gaza City that the crater that remained where the girl’s family died matched others along the beach apparently left by 155-millimeter artillery rounds.

Garlasco said that Palestinian authorities had collected shreds of shrapnel and that he hoped to share some of the pieces with Israeli officials in an attempt to prompt a wider inquiry. Israel has complained that Palestinian officials lent little help in the army’s investigation.

“The most likely scenario is that Israeli shells coming down are what killed the family,” Garlasco said.

Ellingwood reported from Gaza City and Wilkinson from Jerusalem.