Israel says its air strike killed five Gaza militants planning attack

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Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Al-Maleki condemned an Israeli air strike that killed five in Gaza late Saturday in one of the deadliest strikes since the 22-day Gaza incursion that began in Dec. 2008 and killed some 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis. But the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and witnesses claim the five were preparing to launch a rocket into Israel at the time of the strike.

The Palestinian Authority protests each “Israeli attack against our people,” Mr. Maleki said in a Sunday address broadcast by the Palestinian Authority-controlled Voice of Palestine radio station in the West Bank town of Ramallah. “But despite the crimes of the occupation, we maintain the will to continue the process of construction and preparation for the proclamation of the state regardless of the Israeli actions,” he said, according to the Eurasia Review.

Palestinian hospital officials confirmed that the young men were militants, Al Jazeera reports. The Palestine Telegraph refers to them as “martyrs [who] were Palestinian resistance fighters who took a position at the nearby areas of the Israeli borders.”

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Witnesses contacted by the Agence France-Presse news agency said the five belonged to one of the extemist groups that have increased attacks against Israel recently, being either former members of Hamas, which rules Gaza, Islamic Jihad, or the Committees of Popular Resistance.

IDF: Hamas 'solely responsible' for Gaza-based attacks on Israel

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