ASHKELON, Israel (Reuters) - A rocket fired by Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip wounded several people at a shopping mall in the Israeli city of Ashkelon on Wednesday, the Israeli army and emergency service officials said.
By Ophir Avitan
ASHKELON, Israel (Reuters) - A rocket fired by Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip wounded several people at a shopping mall in the Israeli city of Ashkelon on Wednesday, the Israeli army and emergency service officials said.
The strike came as U.S. President George W. Bush met Israeli leaders in Jerusalem to mark the 60th anniversary of the founding of their state -- an event Palestinians commemorate as the "Nakba," or catastrophe, for their people.
A clinic on the top floor of the Hutzot mall, close to Israel's main coastal highway, took the brunt of the blast.
!ADVERTISEMENT!The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command said its fighters launched the rocket, one of an almost daily pattern of militant attacks from the Palestinian enclave.
Ashkelon, which is more than 10 km (six miles) north of the coastal enclave, has generally been out of range but some more powerful rockets, notably Soviet-designed Katyushas or Grads, have struck the city of some 120,000 this year.
Rockets fired from Gaza have killed two Israeli civilians in the past week in agricultural communities closer to the border -- the first such deaths in over two months. In all, such rocket attacks have killed five Israelis in the past year.
The Israeli army regularly attacks Gaza, from which it withdrew occupying troops in 2005. Such raids have killed some 300 people in Gaza this year, more than 100 of them civilians.
After Wednesday's attack, medics said 31 people were treated in hospital. Three of these, including a 6-year-old girl, were seriously hurt.
After meeting Bush, and before word of the latest attack came in, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said he was working for peace, including for a truce with Hamas, but warned Gaza militants that Israel could hit hard if rocket fire continued.
"We hope that we will not have to act against Hamas in other ways with the military power that Israel hasn't yet started to use in a serious manner in order to stop it," Olmert said.
Hamas and its fellow Islamists say they fire rockets as part of a campaign to destroy Israel and take the land from where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were driven out when Israel was established as a state on May 14, 1948.
(Writing by Ori Lewis; Editing by Alastair Macdonald)
