Israeli air strikes kill 2 in Gaza tunnel

GAZA (Reuters) - Israeli warplanes bombed tunnels beneath the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt Saturday killing two Palestinians, after militants fired several mortars at Israel from the coastal territory, medical workers said.

Medical workers who reached the area hours after the attacks said they had recovered the bodies of two Palestinian men involved in digging the subterranean passages Israel says are used to smuggle weapons into Hamas-ruled Gaza.

The men were the first fatalities in Israeli-Palestinian violence since early March when an Israeli missile killed a Palestinian militant Israel said was preparing to launch a rocket.

An Israeli military spokesman said Saturday's strikes targeted three tunnels used to smuggle weapons into the Gaza Strip near the town of Rafah, along the Egyptian border.

Israel had resumed aerial attacks Friday on the tunnels after a nearly two-month hiatus in fighting, after a rocket fired from Gaza struck inside Israel.

Israel said three mortars were fired at Israel from the northern Gaza Strip Saturday, causing no casualties. The Palestinian Resistance Committees, a militant group in Gaza, claimed it had fired the mortars Saturday.

Militant rocket fire had dropped significantly since Egypt began efforts to consolidate the January 18 truce that ended Israel's 22-day offensive against Gaza's Islamic militants.

Israel launched its war on the territory controlled by the Islamist Hamas movement in late December, with the aim of halting cross-border rocket and mortar attacks on the Jewish state by armed militant groups.

A Palestinian human rights organization says 1,417 people were killed, of whom 926 were civilians. The Israeli military says the death toll was 1,166 of whom 295 were civilians.

2 HURT IN WEST BANK

Violence also was reported Saturday in the occupied West Bank where two Palestinian men were shot and wounded in clashes with Israeli soldiers and Jewish settlers, Palestinian medical workers said.

The two sustained moderate injuries in the incident that erupted in a village near the town of Bethlehem where tensions have risen since the slaying last month of a settler boy from a neighboring Jewish enclave.

An Israeli army spokesman said soldiers fired rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse Palestinian protesters at the site. Troops also arrested four Jewish settlers suspected of shooting at the Palestinian village, he said.

Israel has arrested a Palestinian suspect in the April 2 killing of the settler, 13, in Bat Ayin. Three Bat Ayin settlers were sentenced to prison terms of 12 to 15 years in 2002 for trying to set off a bomb near a Palestinian girls' school in Arab East Jerusalem.

(Reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi and Haitham Tamimi; Writing by Allyn Fisher-Ilan; Editing by Dominic Evans)