New fighting on Sunday between Israelis and Palestinians threatened the most recent US bid to calm the region, as occupation forces sent attack helicopters to retaliate for a rain of mortar shells fired by resistance fighters, reports said.
Palestinian security forces told the BBC that Israel's US-made helicopter gunships carried out several attacks in the Gaza Strip, razing a police post north of Gaza City and targeting buildings belonging to Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's Fateh group in the central part of the narrow, overcrowded strip.
A third attack was reported against security positions near the Khan Younis refugee camp, in southern Gaza, said the UK-based news service.
Also on Sunday, Israeli troops shot dead a 13-year-old Palestinian boy Sunday on the edge of the West Bank town of Bethlehem as he and other youths pelted soldiers with stones, and wounded a pregnant Palestinian woman in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, according to reports.
Khifah Obeid was hit in the chest and mortally wounded during a demonstration at the northern entrance to the town, in which youths were protesting at the killing of Palestinians by Israeli forces, reported AFP.
The occupation forces said the round of helicopter attacks was in retaliation for Palestinian mortar fire on Saturday, including an attack against the Jewish settlement of Kfar Darom in the Gaza Strip that the BBC said killed one Israeli and wounded two others.
In the wake of the Israeli missile strikes, Reuters reported that Palestinians gathered around the remains of security posts, while others picked through the rubble of homes demolished by Israeli bulldozers in the Deir El Balah neighborhood in southern Gaza.
Suleiman Tawashi sat on the rubble of his house crying as his sister, Sarah, picked through the remains of her nearby home, said Reuters.
``We didn't do anything to have been left homeless this winter. This is a crime... Where is the United States and the world to see what has happened to my home?'' Sarah Tawashi told the agency.
At least 721 Palestinians and 189 Israelis have been killed in the latest Palestinian uprising against 34 years of Israeli military occupation.
The BBC noted that tension had been high in Gaza for months, with Israeli tanks positioned to protect the Jewish settlers on occupied Palestinian land.
According to the UK-based magazine The Economist, Israel has "flouted" the 1993 Oslo peace accords by settling tens of thousands of its people on land seized from Palestinian owners in 1967.
DIPLOMACY UNDER FIRE
The Israeli attacks and new clashes came as two United States special envoys were traveling to Israel in an attempt to revive the Mideast peace process, which Washington sees as critically important to rallying Arab support for its war on terrorism.
The US bills itself as an impartial broker for the peace talks, while supplying Israel with billions of dollars in aid each year, and blocking repeated Palestinian effforts, via the UN, to invite international ceasefire monitors into the region.
Former US Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni and Assistant Secretary of State William Burns are due to arrive in the region on Monday, according to Reuters.
Palestinian officials have accused Israel of trying to derail the US mission.
``This military escalation came at this time in order to sabotage and block the way of American efforts to try to bring calm to the area,'' Palestinian Major-General Abdel-Razek Al Majaydeh, chief of preventive security in the Gaza Strip, told Reuters.
Israeli officials, meanwhile, have told the press that their attacks are justified as part of the nation's defense.
The US envoys are expected to push Palestinians to stop the "violence," and urge Israel to follow recommendations in the Mitchell Report to end settlement activity.
However, Israeli Prime Minster Ariel Sharon is an adamant supporter of the settlers, and also backs making the occupied city of Jerusalem into Israel's "eternal" capital.
Virtually no country in the world recognizes Israel's claim to Jerusalem, which lies outside the borders of the Jewish state as formulated by the UN in the 1940s, but was conquered in 1967.
Israeli stances on both issues have shattered earlier rounds of peace talks - Albawaba.com
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