Gaza City — Palestinian militants attacking an Israeli armoured bulldozer inadvertently killed three other Palestinians Tuesday.
The roadside bomb in the Rafah refugee camp went off a few metres from where the bulldozer – part of an Israeli operation to destroy weapons-smuggling tunnels from Egypt – was piling up dirt in a crowded residential area, Associated Press Television News said.
No Israelis were injured but three Palestinian men 200 metres away were hit by shrapnel, one so severely it took off half his skull.
Ten people were wounded, including a Reuters TV cameraman, witnesses and hospital officials said.
The violence came a day after extremists killed three Palestinians convicted of collaborating with Israel – two of them in their hospital beds – highlighting the progressive breakdown of law and order in Gaza.
The Hamas organization said two of the dead in Rafah were its members, and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades claimed one of the dead men. Neighbours confirmed that they belonged to militant organizations but said they were not involved in combat units.
Moments before, masked militants were filmed putting a detonator in an alley near the road. Palestinian ambulances were already standing by, as people in nearby buildings waved white flags to show the Israelis the buildings were inhabited by civilians.
The extensive Israeli army operation in the Gaza-Egypt border area began before dawn Tuesday. A spokesman said the bomb was one of four that went off during the night.
The Rafah border area is strewn with land mines and other roadside bombs planted by militants. The bulldozers and minesweepers scour the area to destroy tunnels used by Palestinians to smuggle arms from Egypt into the Gaza Strip.
Meanwhile, Hamas aired a video on the Al-Arabiya satellite television showing three masked men surrounded by weapons. One of the men read a statement threatening to rain rockets from the Gaza Strip on the Israeli town of Sderot.
On Monday, Palestinian vigilantes shot two collaborators in their beds in a Gaza hospital, where they were taken hours earlier with injuries from a grenade explosion in their jail cell that killed a third man convicted in a Palestinian court of collaborating with the Israelis.
The attacks occurred just as Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat ordered a restoration of law and order in the Palestinian territories, where extremists outgun the fragmented Palestinian police forces.
The two collaborators killed in Gaza City's Shifa Hospital – the main medical facility in the city of about 300,000 Palestinians – had confessed during their trials to helping Israeli forces kill two top Islamic militants.
