Gaza City: Two Palestinians were killed in an Israeli strike on north Gaza on Monday, medics said, just hours after gunmen mounted a deadly ambush on the Egyptian border, killing an Israeli.
“Two Palestinians were killed in an Israeli air strike targeting a group of people east of Beit Hanun,” said Adham Abu Selmiya, spokesman for the Hamas-run emergency services.
A spokesman for the Israeli military confirmed the strike but refused to say whether it was connected to the early-morning attack along the Egyptian border.
Witnesses identified the two men as members of the Islamic Jihad movement and said they were riding a motorcycle near the Israeli border at the time.
They named the two as Mohammad Shabat and Ismail Odeh, saying both were in their 20s.
The border clash began around 6.00am (0300 GMT) when a group of up to six gunmen opened fire towards a convoy taking Israeli construction workers to a site where they are building part of the vast fence along the frontier, the army said.
“Fire was opened at Israeli workers during routine construction work on the security fence between Israel and Egypt,” an army spokeswoman said, indicating troops had returned fire killing two of the gunmen.
Another official confirmed an Israeli civilian construction worker was also killed in the ambush, which took place in an area called Nahal Lavan, several kilometres inside the Israel-Egyptian frontier.
The remaining three or four gunmen fled the scene, with troops sealing off the area and mounting a massive manhunt to find them, the army said.
The border incident came just 48 hours after two rockets were fired from Sinai into southern Israel, hitting close to the Negev desert town of Mitzpe Ramon and near Ovda, which lies some 40 kilometres north of Eilat.
Close to Ovda is a very small international airport which is used for civilian and military flights.
In early April, militants in Sinai fired a Grad rocket which exploded near Eilat without causing casualties, with another unexploded rocket later found in the same area.
And in August 2011, a group of gunmen from the Sinai sneaked across the border and carried out a series of ambushes north of Eilat, killing eight Israelis.
In the ensuing manhunt, Israeli troops inadvertently shot dead five Egyptian policemen, sparking a diplomatic crisis with Cairo.
The attack spurred Israel to double the pace of construction of its vast border fence, which is largely finished although it has yet to be completed in several areas in the northernmost and southernmost sectors of the frontier.
Since the overthrow of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in February 2011, several attacks have been launched on Israel from the Sinai. In August 2010, several rockets fired from the Sinai, apparently aimed at Eilat, slammed into the nearby Jordanian port of Aqaba, killing one person and wounding five others.
