GAZA (Reuters) – Israel killed four Palestinian militants and wounded half a dozen others as it kept up air raids in the Gaza Strip for a third day, responding to increased rocket fire, Palestinian medics said.

Gaza militants continued pounding Israel’s south with rockets, wounding five Israelis in the south of the country at around daybreak, Israeli media reports said.

GAZA (Reuters) – An Israeli air strike killed a Hamas commander in the southern Gaza Strip and two of his bodyguards in their vehicle on Saturday, Palestinian medics said.

Israel had no immediate comment on the attack, which raised to 17 the number of Palestinians killed in retaliatory strikes since a rocket fired from the Hamas-ruled territory struck an Israeli school bus on Thursday seriously wounding a teenager.

GAZA (Reuters) – An Israeli air strike killed two militants from the Islamist group Hamas in the southern Gaza Strip on Friday as a fresh spike in cross-border violence continued for a second day.

A Palestinian group said it fired two rockets into Israel around dawn and Israeli shelling also wounded two Hamas militants on a patrol.

GAZA (Reuters) – An anti-tank missile fired from Gaza hit an Israeli school bus on Thursday, wounding several people, and Israeli forces retaliated by shelling the territory, killing a 50-year-old man, Palestinian medics said.

A teenage boy aboard the bus was seriously wounded, and at least eight people including a 4-year-old girl were wounded in the densely populated Gaza Strip by the Israeli response, which included tank, warplane and helicopter fire.

GAZA/RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) – Palestinian journalists are abused with impunity by the security services of West Bank-based President Mahmoud Abbas and his Islamist rivals Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Human Rights Watch said on Wednesday.

A 35-page report by the monitoring group cited reporters’ charges of beatings, arbitrary arrests and equipment seizures by government enforcers — carried out against the backdrop of inter-factional feuding in the divided Palestinian territories.

GAZA/RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) – Palestinian journalists are abused with impunity by the security services of West Bank-based President Mahmoud Abbas and his Islamist rivals Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Human Rights Watch said on Wednesday.

A 35-page report by the monitoring group cited reporters’ charges of beatings, arbitrary arrests and equipment seizures by government enforcers — carried out against the backdrop of inter-factional feuding in the divided Palestinian territories.

GAZA (Reuters) – Gaza militant groups signaled on Saturday they would halt rocket fire at Israel if the Jewish state stopped shootings as well, after a surge in cross-border violence prompted fears of a possible escalation into war.

Hamas spokesman Ismail Rudwan said militant leaders were “committed as long as the occupation (Israel) was committed” to abide by an earlier de facto truce, after a round of talks in Gaza that followed a weeklong surge in attacks.

GAZA (Reuters) – Palestinian rockets struck deep inside Israel Thursday, landing closer to the urban sprawl south of Tel Aviv, and Israeli aircraft pounded targets in Gaza in a surging conflict that has raised fears of a new war.

Israeli police said long-range Grad rockets fired from the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip hit Ashdod and an area north of the Mediterranean port. There were no immediate reports of casualties.

GAZA (Reuters) – Israeli aircraft struck targets in the Gaza Strip in the early hours on Thursday, a day after Palestinian militants fired more than a dozen rockets and mortars across the border, striking deep into Israel.

The Islamist group, which controls the territory, said Israel targeted smuggling tunnels along the Gaza-Egypt border, as well as one of its training camps in central Gaza.

GAZA (Reuters) – Israeli air strikes and shelling killed eight Palestinians in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, medical officials said, in the deadliest day of conflict in the enclave in months.

Palestinian medical officials said three youths aged 12, 16 and 17 who were playing football and an adult relative were killed by Israeli shelling, and four militants were killed later in an air strike elsewhere in the Gaza Strip.