Two Hamas Militants Killed By IDF In Gaza

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Two Palestinian militants were killed by Israeli fire in the Gaza Strip on Sunday, associates of the men and Palestinian medical workers said. An Israel Defense Forces spokeswoman said troops fired mortars at two men they spotted close to the border fence in the north of the enclave. They believed they were planting explosives, she said.

One of the dead was a member of Gaza's ruling Hamas Islamist movement and the other was from an allied group, the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC), representatives of the two groups said. A third man was wounded in the incident, according to medics working at a hospital where he was being treated. It was the first time Israel had confirmed a fatal attack in Gaza in nearly a month.

Two Hamas militants were also killed on Sept. 1, but Israel denied involvement in that incident. The IDF said the two men who died on Sunday were involved in a mortar attack on Israel on Aug. 24 that wounded an Israeli. Since a war in January that killed over 1,000 Palestinians in Gaza, a ceasefire has broadly held, with sporadic exceptions. Overnight, Gaza militants fired two Qassam rockets in the western Negev.

No one was hurt in the attack. A radical Islamist group, which is opposed to Hamas and to the ceasefire with Israel, said it had fired a rocket overnight. Both sides in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict were observing major religious holidays on Sunday - the Jewish New Year and the Muslim festival of Eid al-Fitr. Last month, Israel Air Force aircraft struck a tunnel in northern Gaza in response to a Qassam rocket fired by Palestinian militants into the Sdot Negev region in the western Negev the previous day.

The IDF said the tunnel had been dug from underneath a building located one and a half kilometers away from the border fence. An Israeli security source said intelligence indicated the tunnel had been dug by several Palestinian factions other than Hamas.

It was intended for use to infiltrate into Israeli territory in order to execute a terrorist attack against Israeli citizens or IDF soldiers, the army said.