Death toll rises to 105 on Gaza campaign

GAZA CITY: Two Palestinians were killed in an Israeli strike late Friday, raising the death toll in four days of violence to 105, Gaza health ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra said.

Qudra said the two men, one in his 40s and the other in his 80s, were killed in the Shejaiya area, east of Gaza City.

"This brings the number of martyrs since the beginning of the Israeli aggression to 105," he told AFP.

Earlier, a three-year-old child was killed when a home in northern Gaza was hit, Qudra said, shortly after an elderly man was killed in Beit Lahiya.

The body of a man killed earlier in the week was also found in Deir al-Balah, Qudra said. On Friday morning, six Palestinians were killed in two strikes, including one on the home of an Islamic Jihad militant in the southern city of Rafah, medical sources said.

Witnesses said the militant, Abdel Razzaq al-Ghannam, was not at home when the attack took place, but five other people, including a woman and a seven-year-old child, were killed.

Another 15 people were wounded in the attack which came an hour after another raid on Gaza City's Tel el-Hawa neighbourhood that killed 33-year-old Anas Abu al-Kass.

Qudra said 154 people were wounded in strikes across the Gaza enclave on Friday. The deaths raise to 105 the toll since Israel began Operation Protective Edge early Tuesday in an attempt to halt cross-border rocket fire by militant groups.

Since then, militants have fired at least 500 mortar rounds and rockets that struck Israel, while another 130 rockets were intercepted by the Iron Dome missile defence system, an army spokeswoman said Friday.

It is the deadliest violence since November 2012, with a growing number of rockets fired at Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and even as far north as Haifa. So far, no Israelis have been killed.

However, a soldier was severely wounded in a mortar attack late Thursday, and another man was very seriously injured when a rocket hit a petrol station in the southern port city of Ashdod early Friday.

Two soldiers were lightly wounded along the border with Gaza when Palestinians fired an anti-tank missile.

Israel has authorised the call-up of 40,000 reservist troops, and threatened a ground operation to stamp out the rocket fire.