TEL AVIV, Nov 1: Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's hardline new minister for strategic affairs, said on Wednesday the Jewish state should use the same methods in Gaza that Russia had in Chechnya.

Israel should operate in the Gaza Strip `like Russia operates in Chechnya’, Mr Lieberman, leader of the nationalist Yisrael

Beitenu party, was quoted as saying during a meeting of Israel's security cabinet.

He spoke after six Palestinians were killed and dozens injured in a major Israeli incursion in northern Gaza that the Jewish state said was aimed at stopping rocket fire.

Public Security Minister Avi Dichter, a former chief of the Shin Beth internal security service, reportedly upbraided Lieberman.

“Gaza is not Chechnya and we are not the Russians,” Dichter said. “Our tactics are completely different.”Russia has fought two wars in the southern republic of Chechnya in the post-Soviet period, in which some 10,000 soldiers and tens of thousands of civilians are estimated to have been killed.

Chechnya's capital Grozny was bombed extensively during the campaigns, prompting comparisons with Germany's Dresden after World War II, and Russian troops have been accused of massive human rights abuses in the Caucasus republic.

Some 270 Palestinians and three Israeli soldiers have been killed during the past four months in Gaza in an Israeli offensive after militants killed two soldiers and seized a third in a cross-border raid.—Reuters