Nidal Al-Mughrabi
Reuters
April 4, 2009 - 12:00am
http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSL454598520090404


Israeli forces on Saturday shot and killed a 16-year-old Bedouin girl who opened fire at a police base in southern Israel and two Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip, security officials and medics said.

In the rare incident in southern Israel, the teenager opened fire at a guardpost at the base and was gunned down by border police stationed there, police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said.

No police were injured in the shooting.

Rosenfeld said the girl, a high school student in a Bedouin village in southern Israel, had been armed with a pistol. He added police were investigating the background of the attack.

There were no immediate claims of responsibility for the incident. Israeli forces shut the area to traffic and launched searches for further suspects.

Tens of thousands of Bedouin, once desert nomads, live in villages across the Negev desert region of southern Israel.

In an earlier incident near the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel, Palestinian medics said they recovered the bodies of two gunmen killed by Israeli troops.

An Israeli military spokeswoman said troops had shot at several gunmen trying to plant explosives near the border in northern Gaza, and hit two of them.

One of the slain gunmen belonged to Islamic Jihad and another to a renegade militant group called the Popular Resistance Committees, members of both groups said.

The Gaza border has seen sporadic Israeli-Palestinian violence despite a mid-January ceasefire achieved after a three-week Israeli offensive against the Hamas Islamist rulers of the coastal territory.




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