Israel killed four Palestinian militants and wounded half a dozen others as it pursued air raids in Gaza for a third day today, responding to increased rocket fire out of the territory, local medics said.
Militants in the Gaza Strip, ruled by the Islamist Hamas, continued striking Israel's south with rockets, wounding five Israelis at around daybreak, according to Israeli media reports.
But Hamas also moved to ease tensions with Israel, with a spokesman saying the group's militants had not meant to target Israeli children when they shot at a school bus on Thursday, an attack Israel has singled out as reason to punish Hamas.
"It was not known that the bus targeted on the outskirts of Gaza carried schoolchildren," spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri told Reuters, of the assault that critically wounded an Israeli teenager.
Abu Zuhri described the road near the Gaza frontier where the bus travelled as inside an "Israeli military zone" commonly used by military vehicles used to mount attacks against Gaza.
Hamas also said its rocket barrages were not meant to target civilians and it lacked the technology to avoid harm to innocent bystanders.
At least 18 Palestinian militants and civilians, including an 11-year-old boy, have been killed in retaliatory strikes by Israel since the attack on the Israeli school bus on Thursday, and 36 since the latest round of bloodletting began in earnest on March 20.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said yesterday that Thursday's attack amounted to "crossing a line", adding "whoever tries to attack and murder children puts his life on the line."
Israel maintains the bus that was struck was recognizably marked and was yellow, a colour commonly used for vehicles ferrying schoolchildren.
Gideon Sa'ar, an Israeli cabinet minister, said earlier today Israel would continue responding to rocket attacks.
More than 70 rockets and mortars have been fired from Gaza at Israel since Thursday, damaging a house, police said. Israeli media said half a dozen people have been wounded and thousands have fled for shelter in protected areas.
Some 50 rockets were fired on Friday, and Israel's "Iron Dome" missile defence system has intercepted seven since then.
"We will not permit sporadic shootings or the disruption of life inside Israel," Mr Sa'ar told Israel Radio. "We will continue to operate, under full consideration, to implement a principle of defending our citizens."
Hamas threatened in turn to widen the range of its rocket fire unless Israel stopped its bombing raids, and demanded an Arab League meeting on the fighting, which Palestinian officials said would convene in Cairo tomorrow.
In a pre-dawn strike on Saturday, Israeli forces killed a local Hamas commander in the southern Gaza town of Rafah bordering Egypt, as well as two of his bodyguards, in a targeted strike on a vehicle, medics said.
Israel blamed the slain commander for a rocket strike on its port of Eilat launched from Egyptian Sinai some months ago.
Five militants were wounded in a second air raid in northern Gaza. Another air strike at daybreak killed a further militant.
Two years of periodic, low-level skirmishing on the border escalated suddenly last month when Hamas showered rockets on Israel. Hamas had largely withheld fire since a Gaza war in late 2008 in which 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed.
Political analysts in Gaza have explained the latest bloodshed as an effort by Hamas to divert attention from popular demands - fuelled by pro-democracy unrest elsewhere in the Arab world - for an end to a split with its Western-backed Fatah movement rivals, who govern in the West Bank.
Reuters