Gaza City, February 11: Two Palestinian girls were wounded on Thursday when an Israeli tank shell exploded near their home along the border of the Gaza Strip, Palestinian medics said.
The girls, aged five and nine, were wounded by shrapnel from the blast, according to Muawiya Hassanein, the head of Gaza emergency services.
An Israeli military spokesman said there was an exchange of fire along the border near the Bureij refugee camp, where the strike took place.
“Palestinians opened fire at an army patrol along the security barrier,” the Israeli spokesman charged.
Gaza’s borders have been mostly quiet since a Hamas-Israeli truce following the devastating Israeli offensive against the Strip in December 2008 and January 2009.
Some 1,400 Palestinians (mainly civilians) and 13 Israelis (mainly soldiers) were killed in the 22-day war.
Israeli warplanes bombed several sites in southern Gaza overnight Palestinian medics said on Wednesday.
The Israeli army claimed it was responding to homemade rocket fire from Gaza, but Israel sometimes bombards positions in Gaza without resistance rocket attacks, which are mainly in response to the Israeli siege of the Strip and occupation of the Palestinian territories.
Israel has repeatedly targeted the vast network of tunnels used to smuggle food and construction materials as well as weapons from Egypt into Gaza.
No one was wounded or killed in the strikes, which destroyed an abandoned building in Gaza’s only airport, according to medics.
The airport was shut down and largely destroyed after the outbreak of the 2000 Palestinian uprising, or intifada, and has not been used since.
Israel, which wants to crush any Palestinian liberation movement, responded to Hamas’s win in the elections with sanctions, and almost completely blockaded the impoverished coastal strip after Hamas seized power in 2007, although a ‘lighter’ siege had already existed before.
Human rights groups, both international and Israeli, slammed Israel’s siege of Gaza, branding it “collective punishment.”
A group of international lawyers and human rights activists had also accused Israel of committing “genocide” through its crippling blockade of the Strip.
Gaza is still considered under Israeli occupation as Israel controls air, sea and land access to the Strip.
The Rafah crossing with Egypt, Gaza’s sole border crossing that bypasses Israel, rarely opens as Egypt is under immense US and Israeli pressure to keep the crossing shut.
Fatah has little administrative say in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and has no power in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem, both of which are Palestinian territories illegally occupied by Israel in 1967.
—Agencies