GAZA CITY, Palestinian Territories — A pregnant Palestinian mother and her toddler daughter were killed when an Israeli air strike demolished their home in the northern Gaza Strip, medical sources said early Sunday.
The fatalities were identified as Nur Hassan, 30, and her daughter Rahaf Hassan, 3. Medics said three others were still trapped under the home’s ruins in the Zeitun sector south of Gaza City.
Israel said it had targeted “two Hamas weapon manufacturing facilities” in response to two rocket launches at Israel during Saturday, as well as a number of attempts by Palestinians to violently break into Israel from Gaza.
One of the rockets had hit an open field in southern Israel and the other was intercepted, while nine Palestinians were killed during the border clashes with Israeli soldiers.
Sunday’s deaths come as violence between Israelis and Palestinians, which began in east Jerusalem and the West Bank several days ago, threatened to spiral out of control.
Israeli security forces on Saturday shot dead two Palestinians aged 12 and 15 in protests along Gaza’s border fence, Palestinian medics said, and Israeli police said they killed three Palestinian assailants in separate violence in Jerusalem.
Eleven days of bloodshed in which four Israelis and 19 Palestinians have been killed in Jerusalem, the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Gaza and in Israeli cities have raised concerns about a new Palestinian uprising.
Near the Old City’s Damascus Gate a Palestinian stabbed two police officers, seriously wounding one of them, a few hours after a 16-year-old Palestinian stabbed and wounded two ultra-Orthodox Jewish men nearby, Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said.
The violence has been fuelled by Palestinian fears that visits by Jewish groups and lawmakers to the Jerusalem Old City plaza revered in Judaism as the site of two destroyed biblical temples, are eroding Muslim religious control of the Al-Aqsa mosque compound, Islam’s third holiest site. – Al Arabiya
