JERUSALEM -- With Palestinian resistance groups reportedly on the verge of calling a cease-fire, Israeli soldiers steered their helicopters over a stretch of road in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday and fired a pair of rockets into the traffic. A taxi driver and a 22-year-old woman died in Israel's latest attack on Hamas, Palestinian sources said.
Palestinians called the airstrike a botched attempt to assassinate Hamas radical Mohammed Siam, who lost his leg but survived -- one of more than a dozen Palestinian casualties in the attack on the militant group.
An Israeli security source said the target was a Hamas cell driving toward farmlands on the edge of the town of Khan Yunis with a stash of mortar shells meant for an attack on a nearby Israeli settlement.
The afternoon strike further muddied preparations for a Palestinian truce. Some Palestinian radicals said a cease-fire agreement had been reached and could be announced within hours; others said there was no such accord.
In the Gaza Strip, a freshly angered Hamas vowed to avenge the Israeli rocket attack.
The explosions occurred just as a flurry of reports were circulating of an immediate call to peace from militants. There was apparently no connection, although Wednesday's attack was the latest in a string of Israeli attempts at "targeted killings" of Palestinian militants as mediators are struggling to broker a truce.
Despite a desperate push to implement the U.S.-backed peace "road map," the blood of suicide bombings, army raids and gun battles has continued to stain these lands.
On Wednesday, the 1,000th day of fighting in the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, an Israeli soldier was wounded and two Hamas members were shot dead in a gun battle in the Gaza countryside. Meanwhile, Israeli police captured a pair of suspected Palestinian bombers in an Israeli Arab village, and detonated the heavy explosives.
Palestinians have pinned dwindling hopes for peace on a formal cease-fire pledge expected any day from Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement.
Under the cease-fire, Palestinian radicals would halt all attacks on civilians in Israel proper, as well as on soldiers and settlers in the Palestinian territories, for three months. Settlers are often deemed acceptable military targets by even those Palestinians who condemn attacks within Israel's 1967 borders. Palestinians hope that the cease-fire will give their security forces time to regroup and satisfy international calls for progress.
