Israeli airstrikes kill 7 militants

JERUSALEM — Israeli helicopter gunships killed seven militants of the radical Hamas movement on Friday in separate airstrikes on two vehicles, one near Nablus in the West Bank and the other in Gaza City, Israeli army and Palestinian officials said.

The airstrikes, an hour apart, followed a barrage of Qassam rocket and mortar attacks on Israeli settlements and towns in the Gaza Strip and towns in Israel. An Israeli woman, Dana Glakowitz, 22, was killed Thursday evening as she sat on her porch.

At least 19 more Qassam rockets and dozens of mortar shells were fired Friday by Palestinians in Gaza, Israeli officials said, with five falling in or near Sederot, an Israeli town just outside Gaza. A woman, 18, and a girl, 4, were lightly injured.

Earlier on Friday, Palestinian police officers clashed with Hamas fighters in a continuation of firefights that began Thursday night after the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and his interior minister, Nasser Youssef, declared a state of emergency in Gaza and ordered security services to stop Hamas and Islamic Jihad from firing on Israelis.

Israeli officials say they will stop terror attacks if Abbas and the Palestinian Authority will not. On Friday, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, the Israeli military chief of staff, said, "This calm is dissolving."

Speaking of Gaza, he told Israeli radio, "The way things look now, the ineptitude of the Palestinian Authority and its inability to enforce its rule on the turn of events there is drawing us nearer to a reality in which we will have to take care of things so that there is no terror."

On Thursday night the Palestinian police fired on a Hamas vehicle when the driver refused to stop at a checkpoint. Officers opened fire on the car and wounded five Hamas fighters who were planning to fire mortars at Israeli sites, the police said. Hamas gunmen then attacked a Palestinian police post elsewhere with automatic weapons and grenades and burned two police cruisers.

On Friday, in Gaza City, two Palestinian bystanders — a teenager and a child — were killed in another firefight between Palestinian policemen and Hamas. The police were searching for those who had fired mortars and rockets at Israel, and in retaliation, militants burned down a Palestinian police station and set fire to police vehicles. In heavy fighting, the police withdrew, leaving masked fighters in position on street corners.

A Hamas spokesman, Sami Abu Zuhri, said his group was demanding Youssef's resignation and had been retaliating for arrests and killings of Palestinian fighters by the Israelis.

Spokesmen for Hamas told reporters in Gaza that fighting could increase, but the intra-Palestinian fighting appeared to be dying down by the afternoon, about the time that Israel launched its two strikes.

Afterward, Hamas said such attacks could "open the gates of hell," adding that it was reconsidering its adherence to the Israeli-Palestinian cease-fire, which has been broken regularly by both sides.