A suspected U.S. drone fired a missile into a Pakistani village early on Thursday, killing at least four people, residents and an official said, the latest strike aimed at a stronghold of a Taliban commander.

The strike targeted a village in the North Waziristan tribal region near the Afghan border where Jalaluddin Haqqani, an old friend of Osama bin Laden, had established a madrasa or religious school. Haqqani's extended family used to live there.

"A large number of militants are rushing towards the area in vehicles," a Reuters witness said by telephone from Miranshah, the main town of North Waziristan, soon after the strike.

Villager Zardad Khan later said four people were killed and three wounded in the attack.

"They were all local people," he said.

An intelligence official, however, said seven people, including militants, were killed.

Twenty-three people, most of them relatives of Haqqani, were killed in a similar attack on the same village in September.

U.S. forces in Afghanistan, frustrated over growing cross-border attacks from the Pakistani side of the border, have carried out about a dozen missile strikes and a commando raid in Pakistan since the beginning of September.

A large number of militants have been killed in the attacks but no senior al Qaeda or Taliban commander has been reported to have been killed.

One of Haqqani's sons had told Reuters that the elderly commander was in Afghanistan when the village was hit in September.