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Palestinians Send Children to Retrieve Rocket Launchers After Attacks on Israel

[Ha'aretz] Yuval Azoulay, Yoav Stern and Mijal Grinberg - Israeli forces combating Palestinian gunmen in Gaza killed Yehia Habib, a senior Hamas field commander in Gaza City, in an airstrike Wednesday on a group of armed men who had approached the border fence with Israel. On Tuesday two figures were seen moving in a field near Beit Hanun toward rocket launchers immediately after Kassam rockets had been fired on towns in Israel. The two were killed by a tank shell. Later it was learned that they were a 9-year-old and a 12-year-old sent to collect Kassam rocket launchers. "If these were children or youths, we regret the use that the terrorist groups are making of them," the IDF spokesman said Tuesday. An IDF source said: "Every Palestinian, including the militants, knows that anyone who hangs around these launchers is endangering themselves." "This is a cynical use of children but we are no longer surprised by anything we see. A 14-year-old child has already fired an RPG rocket against an IDF force, a grandmother aged close to 70 fired a light weapon against a Givati [Brigade] force recently in the Strip. What were these children doing there anyway? The militants fled immediately after the launch and then sent the children to collect the launchers," a source added.
2007-08-22 01:00:00
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