Israeli tank fire killed a 14-year-old Palestinian boy in the northeastern Gaza Strip on Sunday, near the demarcation line with Israel, Palestinian security and hospital officials said.
The boy and a companion were fired at near the Palestinian town of Beit Hanun, to the northeast of Gaza City, Palestinian officials said.
The boy was blown to pieces by the tank shell, they told AFP.
The incident followed pre-dawn raids by Israeli US-made F-16 and F-15 warplanes which killed a Palestinian policeman as they attacked PA police headquarters in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The combat aircraft struck in Gaza City and Deir El Balah, in southern Gaza, as well as in Salfit, in the northern West Bank, said AFP and Haaretz newspaper.
F-15 and F-16 planes attacked the main command building of the Palestinian police in Gaza, the Palestinian military intelligence and police buildings in Dir El Balah in the Strip, and police headquarters in the West Bank village of Salfit in the Nablus area.
AFP identified the dead Palestinian policeman as Ala’ Abu Bakra from Rafah.
Several hours before the aerial assault, Haaretz said that Israeli ground forces thrust into Palestinian-controlled territory in the Rafah area in southern Gaza, and attacked positions of the Palestinian national security branch.
Israeli authorities told the paper that one of the security branch members "was involved in the attack on the Marganit base in the Gush Katif settlement bloc.”
Three Israeli soldiers were killed and seven others were injured in the operation, claimed by the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Three Palestinian police officers were wounded in the Gaza City attack, Palestinian General Abdel Razek Al Majeida told AFP.
The five-storey police building here was ablaze and completely destroyed, he added.
The Israeli military spokesman said that the bombings were in retaliation to a Palestinian attack west of Jerusalem late Saturday which killed three people, including a Jewish settler couple. Two children were wounded in that attack.
AFP reported that the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed wing of the Fateh faction, claimed on Sunday responsibility for an overnight attack that killed the two Jewish settlers in the West Bank.
The two Palestinians who launched the attack - the first time during the unrest that gunmen successfully entered an Israeli army position - were also killed.
In the land-based Israeli action, tanks destroyed three Palestinian offices in the south of Rafah, near the Gaza Strip's border with Egypt, including the local headquarters of Palestinian national security, said AFP. One soldier was lightly wounded in the operation, added the agency.
Two other Palestinian buildings near the Karni crossing point between the Gaza Strip and Israel, in the east of the city, were also demolished, he said.
In a separate incursion, at least two Israeli tanks moved into an area east of Gaza City, but no casualties were reported in that area.
The army said it withdrew after about two hours after the operations began, according to AFP.
AFP's latest death tally for the Palestinian uprising against 34 years of Israeli military occupation comes out to 13 Arab Israelis, 566 Palestinians, and 146 Israelis, putting the ratio of casualties at around four Palestinians killed for every Israeli loss.
Israel’s wounded number in the high hundreds, according to army sources, while the Palestine Red Crescent Society puts the number of Palestinians injured at over 14,000.
Amnesty International reported early this year that almost 100 Palestinian children had been killed by Israeli soldiers, nearly all in situations where the occupation troops were under no immediate threat.
The latest Palestinian uprising against 34 years of Israeli military occupation began last September – Albawaba.com
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