JABALYA (Gaza Strip), March 6: Israel and the Palestinians sank further into their cycle of violence as 11 Palestinians were killed in an army raid in Gaza on Thursday. The raid came a day after a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up aboard an Israeli bus and killed 15 passengers, including two soldiers and six teenagers.

Some 40 Israeli tanks stormed the northern Gaza Strip town of Jabalya for five hours, the latest in a string of deadly incursions into the densely populated territory, and were met by intense small arms fire.

According to Palestinian sources, eight people were killed instantly and dozens wounded when Israeli tanks fired controversial flechette shells as they were withdrawing from the entrance of the town.

Among the three other Palestinians killed in the raid was a 60-year-old man critically wounded when his house was hit by a helicopter rocket and who died of his wounds as ambulances were unable to reach him, they said.

An Israeli army spokesman said only one shell was fired when a soldier spotted a Palestinian about to launch a rocket, but witnesses charged the shell was deliberately aimed at a group of civilians which included children.

Two journalists from the Reuters news agency were wounded in the devastating shell explosion, one of them seriously. Flechette shells are anti-personnel weapons which fire hundreds of tiny darts in all directions.

In Jabalya camp, home to 89,000 people, some of the streets were cut by trenches while the electricity and telephone networks were wrecked.

The high death and injury toll came after Israel’s latest operations in the Gaza Strip sparked criticism of the army’s heavy-handed methods and calls for restraint, including from the United States.—AFP