GAZA CITY, Oct 20: At least four Palestinians were killed and 40 wounded, 10 of them seriously, in an Israeli air strike in the central Gaza Strip late Monday, Palestinian security sources said, revising an earlier toll. The attack follows three air raids in which three Palestinians were killed earlier in the day.

The strike preceded a speech by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in which he laid the blame for the continuing violence at the feet of Yasser Arafat.

Two of the dead were members of the Hamas’s armed wing, killed when a missile fired by a combat helicopter slammed into their car as they were driving in the centre of Gaza City.

Ezzedin al Qassam Brigades members Khaled al Masri and Iyad Fayez al Hilu had been trying to drive away with weapons they had salvaged from the site of an earlier raid on a weapons base, Hamas sources said.

One other person was killed and 10 injured as they were travelling in cars near the scene of the strike.

Fifteen people had been injured around two hours earlier in an Israeli F-16 raid in the east of the city on what the Israeli military said was a Hamas weapons factory.

And a third strike took place when helicopters attacked a hut in a field on the northeastern outskirts of the city. There were no casualties.

Palestinian security officials had initially said the target of the F-16 attack appeared to be the house of a senior Islamic Jihad figure, Abdullah Shami, but the missile landed on a nearby building still under construction in the east of the city.

Israeli army spokeswoman Major Sharon Feingold said the building was being used to assemble makeshift Qassam rockets, adding that the aim of the air strikes was to “target the arteries of terror”.

The Israeli premier, in a speech marking the start of a new parliamentary session, said the troubled roadmap was the only hope of ending conflict.

In his speech, Ariel Sharon did not once mention the name of Mr Abbas’s successor, Ahmed Qorei, who was appointed prime minister of an emergency cabinet earlier this month.

But he did single out Mr Arafat as the main hurdle to progress in the peace process.—AFP