Israelis kill five Palestinians

Israeli troops killed five armed Palestinians in the Gaza Strip yesterday as they pressed on with a massive offensive aimed at stopping militants firing rockets into Israel.

The dead included a local commander of Hamas Islamic militants in Gaza's Jabalya refugee camp, the focus of Israel's biggest push into the occupied territory in four years of conflict, witnesses said.

Scores of Palestinians have died in the offensive, now in its 11th day.

Earlier yesterday troops killed two militants in a gunfight at nearby Beit Hanoun, one of the main launch sites for the makeshift rockets, and two Palestinian policemen in a missile strike on a refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip.

In Egypt, rescue workers searched for survivors in the wreckage of a Red Sea hotel after a series of bomb blasts targeting Israeli tourists in the Sinai Peninsula. Israel suspects Thursday night's attacks, which killed at least 33 people, were linked to Al-Qaeda.

Violence in Gaza has soared ahead of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's planned withdrawal of troops and settlers next year from the territory captured in the 1967 Middle East war.

Militants want to claim any pullout as a victory for a Palestinian uprising launched in 2000. Israel is determined to smash them first and Sharon needs to put on a show of force for rightists who oppose the plan on the grounds it "rewards terrorism".

At least 86 Palestinians, 50 of them militants and most of the others civilians, have been killed in the offensive with some 200 tanks and armoured vehicles that was launched after a rocket attack killed two Israeli toddlers on September 29.

Three Israelis have died since the offensive began.

The armed wing of Hamas, a group sworn to Israel's destruction, said local leader Abdel-Raouf Nabhan was shot dead yesterday. Witnesses had earlier said he was killed in a missile strike.

The army said it shot at militants trying to launch a rocket and that might have caused an explosion.

Two fighters were also killed in Beit Hanoun yesterday as troops moved in to demolish the home of a militant killed in an earlier missile strike as he tried to leave a rocket launch site with a donkey cart, witnesses said.

Israel regularly demolishes the homes of those involved in attacks on the Jewish state, saying it helps to dissuade future violence. Palestinians call it collective punishment and say it fuels anger.

Two Palestinian policemen were killed in a pre-dawn missile strike on the southern Gaza refugee camp of Khan Younis. The army said it had fired at armed men in the militant hotbed, which abuts Jewish settlements.