GAZA CITY, Feb 27: Ten Palestinians, including at least six militants, were killed in Israeli air strikes on Wednesday while Palestinians rockets killed an Israeli in a spate of attacks across the Gaza Strip.

The fresh violence came the day after the United Nations urged Egypt, Israel and the Palestinians to find a fresh strategy to end the blockade of the Gaza Strip and halt rocket firing into Israel.

The deadliest attack occurred in the southern town of Khan Yunis where five Hamas fighters were killed in a raid which also wounded one person, medical sources said.

It was followed by a second strike on the same site that left three people wounded, the sources added.

Another militant from the armed wing of the radical Islamic Jihad movement was killed overnight in an air strike in the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza, Palestinian medical sources said.

Two more Palestinians, whose identities were not immediately known, were killed in an afternoon air raid on a Gaza City neighbourhood from which rockets had just been fired, witnesses said.

Another air strike just after nightfall near a gas station north of Gaza City killed another two Palestinians and wounded 12 others, including four children between the ages of six and 10, medics said.

An Israeli army spokeswoman confirmed the strike, saying it had targeted a group about to launch rockets.

The latest assaults came shortly after an Israeli man was killed when one of 26 rockets fired from Gaza slammed into a college on the outskirts of the southern Israeli town of Sderot.

Hamas claimed responsibility for what was the first killing of an Israeli by Gaza rocket fire since May 2007 — before the movement seized power in Gaza in June — saying it had been to avenge the death of its militants.

Another of the rockets exploded in a hospital parking lot just outside the city without wounding anyone, the army said.

Britain condemned the rocket attacks, and urged Israel to show restraint.

Israel carries out frequent air and ground raids in the densely populated coastal strip in an effort to curb near-daily rocket and mortar fire.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, on a visit to Japan, vowed to continue operations in Gaza, where Hamas seized power in June after routing forces loyal to moderate Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas.

“Hamas must bear responsibility for its actions,” Olmert told reporters earlier in Tokyo.

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri warned that the Islamic movement reserved the right “to respond by all means available” to what he called Israel’s “grave escalation” of the conflict.

In the West Bank, undercover Israeli troops shot dead a Palestinian militant during an arrest raid in the town of Nablus, security and medical sources said.—AFP