The Middle East: The Israeli army has said that a bullet fired by troops had unintentionally hit a diplomatic vehicle in the Gaza Strip on Monday and that it regretted the incident.
A Swiss Foreign Ministry spokesman said an armoured vehicle clearly marked as diplomatic and carrying its representative to the Palestinian Authority and a colleague had been shot by Israeli troops at a Gaza roadblock. Neither passenger was hurt, the spokesman said.
Diplomatic sources said members of the convoy, which included diplomats from Switzerland, Britain, Greece, Sweden and Austria, were badly shaken. An initial Israeli military inquiry found that forces had fired warning shots at a "threatening" Palestinian crowd at the checkpoint when a bullet "ricocheted and inadvertently hit the vehicle window" of the diplomatic car.
"The Israeli army expresses its sorrow over the incident and stresses that the forces in the area are doing everything possible to avoid harming civilians," an army spokesman said yesterday. The military was investigating further and had not taken any punitive measures as yet, he added.
The army launched a raid into Beit Hanoun earlier this month, which it said was to prevent Palestinian militant groups from firing rockets into southern Israel.
There have been several incidents in which vehicles of foreign representatives have been shot at since the intifada began in September 2000. In the worst such incident, Palestinian militants shot dead two international observers, one Swiss and the other Turkish, in an ambush in March last year near the West Bank city of Hebron. - (Reuters)