Israel hits Gaza

Israeli troops killed four Palestinians, three of them militants, in its latest assault on the Gaza Strip on Sunday as Prime Minister Ehud Olmert unveiled plans to protect nearby homes from rockets.
Troops supported by helicopters moved into the southern Gaza Strip overnight, killing a civilian and three militants from the armed wing of the Islamist Hamas movement that has ruled the Strip since June, medics said.
The operation was aimed at "infrastructures of terrorist organisations," an Israeli military spokesman told AFP. "We attacked armed men."
The army completed the operation by mid-afternoon and withdrew its forces from Gaza after arresting 20 Palestinians, army radio reported. During the operation one Israeli soldier was "seriously wounded" and evacuated by helicopter to a nearby hospital, the army said in a statement, adding that the soldier was a member of an elite unit.
The latest incursion came as Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert unveiled plans to reinforce Israeli homes near the border with Gaza which have come under near-daily rocket and mortar attack in recent months.
"Fifteen schools are already completely secure, and today we will decide on proposals which will be brought for government approval next week and are aimed at completing reinforcement measures," Olmert told a weekly cabinet meeting.
He then held a special ministerial meeting to discuss a new proposal for supplying bomb shelters to homes near the Gaza border.
The proposal would protect the residents of some 8,000 houses at a cost of around 97 million dollars (66 million euros), a senior official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
"This new project will cover the reinforcement of 8,000 of the 10,500 homes within a range of 7 kilometres (4.3 miles) from the Gaza border, including all the houses within 4.5 kilometres (2.8 miles)," the official said.
Until now the government has agreed to pay only for the part of the cost of securing homes in areas vulnerable to fire from Palestinian militants in Gaza.
Since Hamas seized power in the Gaza Strip in June 2007 militants have fired nearly 2,000 rockets and mortar rounds at southern Israel, rarely wounding anyone but leaving residents in a constant state of fear.
On Sunday a rocket slammed into the town of Sderot, the southern Israeli town that has borne the brunt of the attacks, without causing casualties. Israel has been on heightened alert in recent days following the killing of a top commander in the Lebanese Hezbollah militia in Damascus last week in an explosion Hezbollah blamed on Israel.
Israel celebrated the death of Imad Mughnieh-believed to have been behind a string of deadly attacks in the 1980s and 1990s against Israeli and US targets-but denied any involvement in his death.
On Sunday Israel's Defence Minister Ehud Barak warned of a possible revenge attack from Hezbollah, possibly with the help of its sponsors Syria and Iran. "Israel has no interest in an escalation, but in view of recent events we are preparing accordingly," he said.
A Syrian newspaper on Sunday quoted what it called a "well-informed source" saying that a number of suspects of Arab nationality had been arrested in connection with Mughnieh's killing.
Israel is meanwhile pushing ahead with recently revived peace talks with Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, whose forces were routed from Gaza last summer.
Olmert and Abbas will meet for the next round of talks on Tuesday, while negotiating teams have been discussing the thorniest issues in the decades-old conflict since last month.
But the talks have bogged down amid disagreements over West Bank settlements and the ongoing violence in Gaza. At least 184 people have been killed since peace talks were formally relaunched at a US conference in November, the vast majority of them Gaza militants, according to an AFP tally. Since the outbreak of the latest Palestinian uprising in 2000 at least 6,145 people have been killed, most of them Palestinians, according to an AFP count.