Israeli ferocious incursion into the camp left a trail of wide-scale destruction

Additional Reporting by Mustafa al-Sawaf, IOL Palestine Correspondent

GAZA CITY, March 2 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – A Palestinian boy died in the southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis on Sunday, March 2, of wounds sustaining earlier in the day after a fresh large-scale Israeli incursion into the area, Palestinian medical sources said.

Abdel-Rahman Jadallah, 9, was playing in the rubble left behind after the incursion which killed two Palestinians, wounded 40, and damaged several buildings in the city, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.

Later Sunday, four Palestinian youths were wounded, two of them critically, when they visited the wreckage and Israeli soldiers opened fire on them, Palestinian medical sources said.

More than 20 Israeli tanks, backed by Apache helicopter gunships, stormed into the refugee camp, leaving along the higher toll of deaths and injured a long trail of razed buildings, Palestinian security sources told IslamOnline.net.

The occupation forces blocked access to ambulance vehicles, demolished the wall of the camp’s hospital and wrecked havoc on Al-Shafai Mosque, they added.

The sources said that the Israeli troops have started withdrawing from the western part of the camp but still stationed in the Austrian neighborhood, which came under heavy bombardment from the Israeli warplanes and tanks.

They added the denizens were forced to leave their houses under duress, noting that the Israeli soldiers thrust into houses and rounded up several of their occupants and leaving many of them homeless.

Resistance Destroys 4 Armored Personnel Carriers, A Tank

Inside a hospital emergency room, a man comforts a crying Palestinian policeman after his friend was killed in the Israeli incursion

Meanwhile, the military wing of the Palestinian Resistance Movement Hamas, Ezzeddin Al-Qassam, said in three statements that its fighters fully destroyed four Armored Personnel Carriers (APCs) and a tank and partially destroyed other tanks of the occupation forces in a defiant resistance to the invasion forces.

The statements, copies of which were obtained by IslamOnline.net, said that soldiers on an Israeli APC were killed while driving in the Austrian neighborhood. Israeli warplanes arrived at the scene to transfer the bodies.

A 40-kilometere explosive device was also set off when another carrier passed by northern Khan Younis at Sunday dawn. The vehicle was completely destroyed, read the second statement.

The third statement read that an explosive device was set off near another APC during the Sunday incursion, adding that an Rotary Base Junction (RBJ) was fired at a fourth personnel carrier in Al-Tufah District.

All of the four districts stopped short of mentioning the scale of damage among the Israeli occupation forces.

Last week, the Israeli forces launched sweeping incursions into the Gaza Strip city of Beit Hanun and the West Bank city of Nablus.

Close to 200 houses have been razed by the occupation army since August 2002, mostly belonging to resistance activists as a deterrent to future resistance operations.

Rights organizations charge this policy amounts to collective punishment as Palestinian homes are typically inhabited by large families.

However, eye-witnesses and security forces told IslamOnline that the Israeli soldiers are carrying out “a systematic operation of flattening all buildings they come across in Nablus, not just houses of alleged resistance activists.”