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Israeli Strike Kills 5 Militants in Gaza
 GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) - Gaza militants threatened Saturday to fire longer-range rockets and target larger Israeli communities, after five Hamas members are killed in an Israeli airstrike. Early Saturday, an Israeli airstrike killed five Hamas militants near the southern town of Khan Younis. Eight others were wounded, one critically, medical officials said. Hamas said the men were on a night patrol east of Khan Younis. The army said it carried out the strike after identifying armed men near its border with Gaza.A spokesman for the Islamic Jihad group said its engineers are trying to produce local copies of Russian-made 122mm Katyusha rockets, which have a reach of up to 19 miles, or halfway from Gaza to Tel Aviv. A senior Hamas official said his group was developing a more lethal type of warhead for the rockets it regularly lobs into Israel, and Abu Mujahed, a spokesman for the Popular Resistance Committees, a group allied with Hamas, said his organization had plans to fire longer-range rockets. ``The real barrage of rockets has not yet begun,'' said Abu Mujahed, whose brother was killed in Saturday's airstrike, adding that ``22 kilometers is not the ceiling.''
 It was an apparent reference to 122mm Katyusha rockets that can hit targets 12 to 19 miles away, about twice the range of the thousands of homemade Qassam projectiles that Gaza militants have fired at Israel communities in recent years. Katyushas are deadlier than the homemade rockets and put larger Israeli communities near Gaza into rocket range. Netivot, a town of 25,000, is 10 miles northeast of Gaza, and Ashkelon, a port city where 115,000 Israelis live, is about 8 miles away.Katyusha fire from Gaza has been rare. The Islamic Jihad militant group claims to have fired three Russian-made rockets at Israel since March 2006, and to have ``many'' in their possession. Israel estimates that a dozen Katyushas were smuggled into Gaza since it left the strip in September 2005. Posted by: Steve White 2007-12-02 |
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