/ 6 July 2007

Thousands attend Gaza funerals, Israel ends raid

Thousands of Palestinians marched in Gaza on Friday for the funerals of 11 people, including nine militants from the ruling Hamas, who were killed in an Israeli raid into the central Gaza Strip a day earlier.

The Israeli army said it had concluded an incursion into central Gaza near the Bureij and Maghazi refugee camps and had pulled its forces out overnight. Local witnesses said the troops had left the area.

Troops with tanks entered Gaza on Thursday and killed armed members of the Islamist Hamas movement that seized control of the coastal enclave last month as well as a member of another militant group and a man medical staff said was a civilian.

Thousands of people marched in the streets of Bureij refugee camp and gunmen fired rifles into the air, vowing revenge.

”This blood will only increase our determination to chase the enemy and to strike it and resist by all our might until the last drop of our blood,” Hamas’s armed wing said in a statement. – Reuters