GAZA CITY, March 9: Sixteen Palestinians were wounded in the Gaza Strip on Sunday as the Israeli army pressed on with its clampdown in the densely populated territory, Palestinian medics said.

In Beit Lahia in the north, 10 Palestinians were wounded in clashes between stonethrowers and Israeli troops, who have reoccupied part of the town and the neighbouring refugee camp of Jabalya for four straight days.

The clashes broke out after the Israeli army ploughed over crops in the area, Palestinian security sources said.

On the southern border with Egypt, three Palestinians, including a woman and a child, were wounded by shrapnel in the town of Rafah as an Israeli tank shell landed near their home.

Meanwhile, four home-made Palestinian rockets were fired by Palestinian militants from the Gaza Strip into southern Israel on Sunday, as Israel retaliated to deadly attacks at the weekend by destroying the homes of Hamas militants.

Israeli military sources said the four Qassam rockets, named for the Ezzedin al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of the Hamas Islamic group, caused no damage when they crashed into fields near the southern Israeli town of Sderot.

Initial reports said only two rockets had been fired.

The Israeli army re-occupied a buffer zone in the northern end of the Gaza Strip on Thursday to hinder the firing of the Qassams, which are unguided Katyusha-style rockets with a range of up to 12 kilometres and carry a 5.5 kilogramme warhead.

Palestinian officials fear the Israeli army could stage a major reoccupation of the Gaza Strip, the stronghold of Hamas and its smaller rival Islamic Jihad, while world attention is focused on a looming US war on Iraq.

Hamas said in a statement released after Sunday’s rocket fire that it had launched the attack, and that its men had returned safely to their bases, despite the ongoing Israeli invasion.

On Saturday evening, two home-made mortars were fired at a Jewish settlement in the Gush Katif bloc in the southern Gaza Strip without causing any injuries.

Hamas also claimed that attack, saying the “bombardment is the first step in the bill the Zionists will have to pay for their crimes against our people, the latest of which was the assassination of a political leader and his three companions.”—AFP