Witnesses said that an air-to-ground rocket was fired
at an area northeast of the town, adding that the fragments of the rocket
wounded three civilians, and one of them died later.
Witnesses said that the dead was a militant of the
ruling Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) and he was killed as he was trying to
plant a roadside bomb in the area.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) clarified late Monday
night that the aim of its night incursion into northern Gaza Strip was only a
limited operation to search for tunnels and roadside bombs.
Palestinians' UN observer Riyad Mansour on Monday
urged the UN Security Council to do its part to avoid a major crisis in the
Middle East by compelling Israel to stop its offensive in Gaza.
Mansour called the standoff over the kidnapped
Israeli soldier "critical," and urged the international community to help keep
Israel and the Palestinians, as well as the entire Middle East, from "plunging
into an irrevocable cycle of violence."
The council cannot abandon its responsibility "in the
face of this rising threat to the already too fragile, tense and instable
security situation in the Middle East," Mansour wrote in a letter to France's
ambassador, who holds the Security Council presidency for July.
White House press secretary Tony Snow urged the
Palestinian militants to release Shalit. "It is the responsibilities of Hamas to
return the Israeli soldier. That's how all this got started. We have also been
encouraging Israel from the very beginning to practice restraint and continue to
do so," he said.
Egypt has been trying to mediate the crisis and
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was in Saudi Arabia on Monday to coordinate
with the Saudis on a solution to the standoff over Shalit.
Egyptian Information Minister Ahmad Nabih el-Fekki
said that the two leaders discussed means to find solutions to the crisis and
that they reached an agreement that Egypt should continue its mediating efforts
to cool down the tension on the Palestinian territories.
In Turkey, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said he had
sent a special envoy to Syria to discuss ways of solving the crisis with
President Bashar Assad. Enditem
