AL QUDS, Aug 31: Israel’s defence minister on Sunday raised the spectre of an Israeli invasion in the Gaza Strip, where Palestinian militants already face a deadly air campaign.

Israeli military commentators say a ground offensive in the densely populated Gaza Strip, home to more than one million people under Palestinian control, would cause heavy Israeli and Palestinian casualties.

“We always have the option of a ground operation in Gaza,” Shaul Mofaz said. “We will exercise it when we decide it is right to do so, at the appropriate time.”

Israel has killed 13 Palestinians, including 10 militants, in helicopter missiles strikes since a Hamas suicide bomber killed 21 people on an Israeli bus in Jerusalem on August 19.

Mofaz spoke to reporters hours after a Palestinian gunman shot and wounded an Israeli truck driver at the Jewish settlement of Rafiah Yam in the southern Gaza Strip, the latest violence to batter a US-backed peace “road map”.

The shooting, claimed by the militant group Hamas, followed an Israeli helicopter missile strike on Saturday that killed Abdullah Aqel, leader of its armed wing in central Gaza, and another Hamas member.

Palestinian Information Minister Nabil Amr said the attack in the Bureij refugee camp destroyed any chance for the resumption of talks with Israel and called on the United States to intervene and halt the cycle of violence.

“Israel’s continuation of such policy means that it is completely turning its back on...calm and the possibility of implementing the road map,” Amr said about the plan that envisages creation of a Palestinian state by 2005.

In a separate Gaza incident, an eight-year-old Palestinian girl was killed by an Israeli tank shell while riding her bicycle near her home in the city of Khan Younis Palestinian security sources and medics said.

The army said troops opened fire in the area after an explosive device blew up near a patrol, damaging a military vehicle. An army spokesman could not confirm anyone was hit.

Israeli security sources said that Aqel, 37, was behind recent rocket attacks on southern Israel from northern Gaza.

“Ashkelon will not become the frontline — neither Ashkelon nor any other place,” Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told reporters on Sunday, referring to the southern city hit on Thursday by a makeshift Qassam rocket that caused no casualties or damage.

Saturday’s missile attack in the Gaza Strip came a day after Palestinian gunmen shot dead a Jewish settler in the West Bank.

Barak in spotlight: A judicial commission of inquiry into the fatal shooting of 13 Arab-Israelis by Israeli police at a demonstration nearly three years ago was due to release its report here on Monday.

The inquiry into the deaths of the 13, who were protesting in support of the Palestinian intifada which had begun a month earlier, is expected to determine responsibility among senior police officers and political leaders.

Faced with massive protests aroused by the killings, especially among the Israeli Arabs who make up around a fifth of the population, the government of the then prime minister Ehud Barak set up the commission to be headed by Supreme Court judge Theodore Or.

The commission criticised Barak when he gave evidence to the inquiry in August last year, for ordering police to reopen “at any price” roads which had been blocked by the demonstrators and had not taken measures to restore calm.

The former Labour premier said that while he had anticipated the protests, he had not expected them to be on such a large scale. Former interior security minister Shlomo Ben Ami said responsibility rested with police officers who had given the order to open fire on the protesters, contrary to advice.—Reuters/AFP